It seems that we can with better accuracy say that the British took nearly years to conquer India and then ruled India for years. In fact, the suppression of the revolt is when the rule really consolidated and officially passed to the British Empire.
It was with the East India Company before that. The Company was one of the great powers on the Indian sub-continent but surely not its ruler. Historical narrative is often subjected to current political constraints.
The slaves of a foreign power for years narrative seeks to build modern nationalism. As Benedict Anderson has found, shame is an important foundation of nationalism. Would a narrative saying Britishers ruled India for 90 years have the same impact in coalescing Indians with their primary loyalties to local communities or kingdoms into modern nationalistic Indian? The only power that could contradict the narrative — the British — would never do it for the opposite reason — pride.
Rulers of India for years? Sure, we will take that on our collective resumes. In the same vein, there is a new narrative of years of slavery that has been mentioned by the PM himself on multiple occassions. Now that we understand the underlying mechanism, this is similar to building a sense of shame that can create Hindu nationalism. In this analysis, India was a collection of fragmented kingdoms until British rule made a country out of these diverse regimes. It was argued that India was previously not one country at all, but a thoroughly divided land mass.
It was the British empire, so the claim goes, that welded India into a nation. Winston Churchill even remarked that before the British came, there was no Indian nation. If this is true, the empire clearly made an indirect contribution to the modernisation of India through its unifying role. However, is the grand claim about the big role of the Raj in bringing about a united India correct? Yet it is a great leap from the proximate story of Britain imposing a single united regime on India as did actually occur to the huge claim that only the British could have created a united India out of a set of disparate states.
That way of looking at Indian history would go firmly against the reality of the large domestic empires that had characterised India throughout the millennia. The ambitious and energetic emperors from the third century BC did not accept that their regimes were complete until the bulk of what they took to be one country was united under their rule. Indian history shows a sequential alternation of large domestic empires with clusters of fragmented kingdoms. We should therefore not make the mistake of assuming that the fragmented governance of midth century India was the state in which the country typically found itself throughout history, until the British helpfully came along to unite it.
Even though in history textbooks the British were often assumed to be the successors of the Mughals in India, it is important to note that the British did not in fact take on the Mughals when they were a force to be reckoned with. The nawab still swore allegiance to the Mughal emperor, without paying very much attention to his dictates. The imperial status of the Mughal authority over India continued to be widely acknowledged even though the powerful empire itself was missing.
When the so-called sepoy mutiny threatened the foundations of British India in , the diverse anti-British forces participating in the joint rebellion could be aligned through their shared acceptance of the formal legitimacy of the Mughal emperor as the ruler of India.
The emperor was, in fact, reluctant to lead the rebels, but this did not stop the rebels from declaring him the emperor of all India. The year-old Mughal monarch, Bahadur Shah II, known as Zafar, was far more interested in reading and writing poetry than in fighting wars or ruling India.
He could do little to help the 1, unarmed civilians of Delhi whom the British killed as the mutiny was brutally crushed and the city largely destroyed. The poet-emperor was banished to Burma, where he died. The grave was not allowed to be anything more than an undistinguished stone slab covered with corrugated iron. I remember discussing with my father how the British rulers of India and Burma must evidently have been afraid of the evocative power of the remains of the last Mughal emperor.
It was only much later, in the s, that Zafar would be honoured with something closer to what could decently serve as the grave of the last Mughal emperor.
I n the absence of the British Raj, the most likely successors to the Mughals would probably have been the newly emerging Hindu Maratha powers near Bombay, who periodically sacked the Mughal capital of Delhi and exercised their power to intervene across India. But the Marathas were still quite far from putting together anything like the plan of an all-India empire. The British, by contrast, were not satisfied until they were the dominant power across the bulk of the subcontinent, and in this they were not so much bringing a new vision of a united India from abroad as acting as the successor of previous domestic empires.
British rule spread to the rest of the country from its imperial foundations in Calcutta, beginning almost immediately after Plassey. It was from Calcutta that the conquest of other parts of India was planned and directed. The profits made by the East India Company from its economic operations in Bengal financed, to a great extent, the wars that the British waged across India in the period of their colonial expansion.
With the nawabs under their control, the company made big money not only from territorial revenues, but also from the unique privilege of duty-free trade in the rich Bengal economy — even without counting the so-called gifts that the Company regularly extracted from local merchants.
In , when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1. While most of the loot from the financial bleeding accrued to British company officials in Bengal, there was widespread participation by the political and business leadership in Britain: nearly a quarter of the members of parliament in London owned stocks in the East India Company after Plassey. The robber-ruler synthesis did eventually give way to what would eventually become classical colonialism, with the recognition of the need for law and order and a modicum of reasonable governance.
But the early misuse of state power by the East India Company put the economy of Bengal under huge stress. Contemporary estimates suggested that about a third of the Bengal population died. This is almost certainly an overestimate. There was no doubt, however, that it was a huge catastrophe, with massive starvation and mortality — in a region that had seen no famine for a very long time.
This disaster had at least two significant effects. First, the inequity of early British rule in India became the subject of considerable political criticism in Britain itself. H ow successful was this long phase of classical imperialism in British India, which lasted from the late 18th century until independence in ?
The British claimed a huge set of achievements, including democracy, the rule of law, railways, the joint stock company and cricket, but the gap between theory and practice — with the exception of cricket — remained wide throughout the history of imperial relations between the two countries.
Putting the tally together in the years of pre-independence assessment, it was easy to see how far short the achievements were compared with the rhetoric of accomplishment. Indeed, Rudyard Kipling caught the self-congratulatory note of the British imperial administrator admirably well in his famous poem on imperialism:.
Alas, neither the stopping of famines nor the remedying of ill health was part of the high-performance achievements of British rule in India. Britain gained hugely from ruling India, but most of the wealth created was not invested back into the country.
For example, from to about , economic growth in India was very slow - much slower than in Britain or America. India actually started importing food under British rule, because Indians were growing 'cash crops' like cotton and tea to be sent to Britain. It is extremely important not to forget the terrible famines that devastated India.
These were partly the result of weather, but partly caused by British policies. Food shortages came about because Indians were growing cash crops. When famine struck in and the British system of government was completely overwhelmed and could not organise a big enough relief effort. As well as these massive famines, there were many other smaller, more localised famines. This was much less than the French, Dutch and Germans took from their lands. They brought in an irrigation programme, which increased the amount of land available for farming by 8 times.
They developed a coal industry, which had not existed before. Public health and life expectancy increased under British rule, mainly due to improved water supplies and the introduction of quinine treatment against malaria. Big landowners, Indian princes, the Indian middle classes all gained in terms of job opportunities, business opportunities and careers in areas like the law.
Ordinary Indians gained little, but the argument still continues about whether British rule made much difference to their lives. Many historians think that the majority of Indians would have remained poor even if they had been ruled by Indians. The debate about British rule in India. The largest rebellion against British rule took place in It was known in Britain as the Indian Mutiny. This was because it began with a rebellion by Indian troops sepoys serving in the army of the British East India Company.
British rule in India was handled by the East India Company. Indian historians dislike the term 'mutiny' because it suggests that only Indian troops were involved. In fact, once some of the Indian troops did revolt, the rebellion against British rule spread rapidly and involved many local Indian leaders who had a wide range of complaints against British rule.
The British preferred to think of the rebellion as a mutiny because this word disguised the huge scale of the rebellion. The word mutiny also covered up the involvement of ordinary Indians. The British preferred to keep this quiet as it suggested that British rule was not widely accepted in India. Telegram alerting the British government to the outbreak of rebellion in India in By permission of the British Library.
0コメント