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15-29 Millionen People died of starvation under the british regime. 4 Million Bengalis that died in the famine of 1948 are nothing compared to it. How could so many Indians die? Churchil denied Indians access to food in order to feed British Soldiers. Unbeievable! (Merdan)

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- J a n   B e y e r

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During the time of a famine, more and more Indian networks, which were created to help each other in a crisis collapsed in fear of a British response. So the British besiegers built supply camps with job opportunities outside of the administrative offices to keep the angry Indians away from them.

The Second World War had made India a self-financing military power, which was on the side of Britain, but also brought a risk of revolt with it. Added to this was the greed for power of the imperial families, who committed several massacres of the Indian population as an expression of panic. As a result, even Indian rulers lost their belief in or their approval towards the Raj.

After World War II India's society was economically depressed. Despite many attempts by Indian politicians and opponents of the Raj, it was initially not possible to establish a stable social order.

In the face of the economic and social low point and the rage of the Indian population, the British officials and soldiers fled.

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In the 19th and 20th centuries, the infrastructure of Britain or a British colony was only improved in response to the fear of nearby economic crises. These fears did not apply to India at first, and neither did the development of Indian infrastructure promise much profit for Britain or British traders.

When an economic crisis hit India around 1850, the railway networks were only expanded very rapidly, as the British had to realize that they might have to move many soldiers from one place to another within a short period of time, in case of an Indian protest.

Crises such as this moved British capitalists to advise British officials in India to put more effort into establishing a stable Indian government, but these official acts did not do so in fear of losing their powerstatus.

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Britain paid millions for the new capital

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Britain paid millions for the new capital

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In the last years of their rule the British spent millions on the new capital at New Delhi, an imperial folly which left India with one of the greatest capitals in the world.

- Lars Mench

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The myth that india was a by British controlled Country:

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The myth that india was a by British controlled Country:

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the british tried to make india look like a calm country, strongly controlled by british. some aspects speak against this "myth". for example, indian people had to fight revolts to improve conditions in india. A good example of this is the highly "respected" construction of the railway lines to facilitate the transport of troops, but this construction was only carried out after several revolts. Another example of the poor conditions for the Indian people is the construction of the water canals, which only came about after several economic crises.

Conclusion: the fact that India is a very quiet and controlled country could be shown to be partially wrong based on the examples given

-Reda Mahrach

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The Indians were treated like subjects.
The Britain's just see the Indians like a way to advance their country. (Malik)

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Railways were used to transport British troops quickly across India to suppress dissent/different opinions
(Dana)

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Foreign rulers have brought a lot of issues in a positive or negative way to India. On the one hand, thez had forced fear, death and slavery. But they weren't there to make things bad. They have brought adavntages for india in certain ways:
First they have to support the industrialization and make India come forward, second, thez have built up a infrastructure, which wouldn't be there without them.
At last but not at least, they have built up a new capital named NEw Dehli.
In the points that this article gives, there can't be made a personal conclusion. The article gives a evrz divided point of view, but it mostly only contains of positive aspects.

Bolin

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Even when people thought Brittain was doing something good for India (building railways) it was still just for their advantage
(Ernesto)

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India had to contribute millions of soldiers to the British forces (more than New Zealand, Canada, Australia, South Africa combined)
(Laeticia)

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In the mid of the 19th Century, British capitalists wanted the government in India to invest more, but British officials refused to act unless it would directly protect their power.
(Nils)

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Britain was not stopping India from their own Industrialisation

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Britain was not stopping India from their own Industrialisation

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India's industrialisation was actually stronger than the British one. The jute manufacturing is a good example. The skilled workers and managers saw the opportunity to produce and manufacture more than just jute. Producing in India became cheaper than producing in Britain and technology started to develop in other areas of the country. Britain did nothing against it and technically helped building up an economy in India. India's economy even turned out to be better and stronger.
Marlene

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Britain wouldn't be as far today without India

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Britain wouldn't be as far today without India

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Indias economy dropped in every aspect for the advantage of the British. Basically Britain exploited India to make their industrialisation possible.
(Ernesto)

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Between 15-29 million Indians died due to starvation (food was given to well-supplied soldiers and european stockpiles)
(Laeticia)

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from the mid 18th century to independence the British presided over a regime that was chaotic, violent & driven by uncontrolled passions
(Dana)

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India´s economy itself is better than the british one

Indian industrialisation destroyed the British equivalent

Britain paid millions for the new capital

Britain actually gave INdia the chance to build up their economy and industries

- Lars Mench

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The effect of the two World Wars on India

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The effect of the two World Wars on India

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India got used as Britain's stepping stone to defend their position in Asia, destroying India's mentality and economy. The World Wars brought economic depression.

- Lars Schädlich

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British Investment in India and forming of society

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British Investment in India and forming of society

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During the British rule in India they already invested in Indian society and infrastructure by building railways, the new capitol Delhi, which costed them millions, and schools and university giving more Indians the chance on education.
Moreover they indirectly unified the country and brought a unifying language.
-Felicitas

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During the British rule there wasn´t an effort to improve the Indian infrastructure. India was built in response to crisis. They only did what was necessary to protect their power. When British capitalists wanted to invest more into the indian government, British officials refused, unless it would directly protect their power.
(Lorin)

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The image of order and control is a fiction

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The image of order and control is a fiction

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From the mid 18th Century to independence in 1947, the British presided over a regime that was chaotic, violent, driven by uncontrolled passions and profoundly wracked by anxiety.
(Nils)

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Summary of the article's position towards the integrity of the British Raj in India.

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Summary of the article's position towards the integrity of the British Raj in India.

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Basically it can be said that the rule of the British in India was not intended as a strategic expansion of the 2nd British Empire.

The British came into contact with India for the first time in the form of the East India Company, which, in view of the Indian rulers, saw its supremacy as a trading power in Europe and India at risk.

An unjustified fear of state-security and financial loss moved the British to begin a conquest in the direction of India.

The British established many military outposts near or in India. These unjustifiably conquered Indian land sections, which meant that India was (initially) not completely ruled by the British, but only partially and therefore no stable administration of India could come together.

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Severe damage to Indian textile industry

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Severe damage to Indian textile industry

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Britons tried to undermine Indian textile infrastructure (Mr Materne)

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The myth of ’strong’ British rule in India 

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The myth of ’strong’ British rule in India 

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In the midst of busy London, the Oriental Club off Oxford Street seems a haven of peace and power.

Founded as a home for the Britons who ruled India in the days of the Raj, its wood panels, leather armchairs and faint smell of mulligatawny soup convey an image of ordered dominance to which many now look back with nostalgia.

It is present even in the most vehement criticisms of the Raj. Like the defenders of British rule, its fiercest detractors assume it was an effective system of government - they just think its power was malevolent, not benign.

'Never intended to rule'

But this image of order and control is a fiction, which belies the reality of life in British India. For 200 years, from the mid 18th Century to independence and partition in 1947, the British presided over a regime that was chaotic, violent, driven by uncontrolled passions and profoundly wracked by anxiety.

The British never intended to rule India.

Their conquest was not driven by a strategy to spread their power, either in their own interests or that of the people they ruled.

Trade always involved violence, with the company recruiting armies and building forts from the late 1600s.

A combination of paranoid concerns about defence and the opportunity for military glory then created an impulse towards conquest from the mid 18th Century onwards.

In practice, from the beginning to the end of Britain's empire, the British created a series of heavily fortified outposts, doing little more than what they thought was necessary to protect their power.

Order and some level of public service was provided in imperial cities and district capitals where Britons resided, but there was no effective government machinery in much of Indian society.

By contemporary standards, the size of the state was tiny, and the capacity for political action very limited.

During the 19th and early 20th Centuries, British infrastructure was usually built as a panicked response to crisis; public works were not a measured effort to improve Indian society or even help British traders profit. Irrigation works were started in the 1850s only after a series of economic crises made the British worry about rebellion and diminishing taxes.

Railways were only backed enthusiastically after the great rebellion of 1857 proved the need to be able to transport troops quickly across India to suppress dissent.

Fear of political challenge

In the middle of the 19th Century even British capitalists wanted the government in India to invest more, but British officials refused to act unless it would directly protect their power.

The chaos of British rule helped turn late 19th Century India into one of the world's most famine-prone societies, as the political networks and mechanisms with which Indians supported each other in times of need were undermined by the British fear of political challenge.

Famine relief was focused on protecting centres of British authority and keeping expenditure as low as possible. The initial strategy was to build famine camps to provide the starving with work far away from existing centres of settlement, so the poor didn't cluster and protest in imperial towns.

British rule ended amid a cycle of violence sparked by the Raj's paranoid concerns about its own security. The 20th Century's two world wars turned India into a massive self-financing barracks essential to defend Britain's position throughout Asia - but it also racked up anxiety in the face of challenge.

'Existential crisis'

The political strategy of Indian opponents to British rule was designed to create an ordered society in contrast to the chaos and violence they associated with imperial power. That, for example, was the aim of Mohandas Gandhi's strategy of non-violence. But amidst economic depression and world war, Indian society fragmented.

The Raj's failure to provide protection to different social groups meant fear and a tendency towards retaliatory violence spread throughout north India. The end of World War Two was marked by mass poverty and an unprecedented social collapse.

By 1946, Britons felt that their state could no longer uphold its core purpose, to maintain their own safety. The speed with which British officers fled India in 1947 was remarkable.

For too long, we have been taken in by the self-justifying stories written by the Raj's retired officers in places like the Oriental Club, of the myth of order and firm government. When, after the Chilcot Inquiry, we so obviously see the chaotic consequences of unplanned violence in our own times, it is time those myths were finally laid to rest and we understood the reality of the Raj.

Jon Wilson teaches history at King's College London. His book India Conquered. Britain's Raj and the Chaos of Empire is published by Simon and Schuster

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Viewpoint: The myth of 'strong' British rule in India

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Jon Wilson revisits the history of British rule in India and concludes it was not an effective system of government, but chaotic, violent and wracked by anxiety.

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At the end of May, the Oxford Union held a debate on the motion "This house believes Britain owes reparations to her former colonies". Speakers included former Conservative MP Sir Richard Ottaway, Indian politician and writer Shashi Tharoor and British historian John Mackenzie. Shashi Tharoor's argument in support of the motion, went viral in India after he tweeted it out from his personal account. The argument has found favour among Indians, where the subject of colonial exploitation remains a sore topic. Here he gives a summary of his views:

Indian economy

At the beginning of the 18th Century, India's share of the world economy was 23%, as large as all of Europe put together. By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to less than 4%.

The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

By the end of the 19th Century, India was Britain's biggest cash-cow, the world's biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants - all at India's own expense. We literally paid for our own oppression.

De-industrialisation of India

Britain's Industrial Revolution was built on the de-industrialisation of India - the destruction of Indian textiles and their replacement by manufacturing in England, using Indian raw material and exporting the finished products back to India and the rest of the world.

The handloom weavers of Bengal had produced and exported some of the world's most desirable fabrics, especially cheap but fine muslins, some light as "woven air".

Britain's response was to cut off the thumbs of Bengali weavers, break their looms and impose duties and tariffs on Indian cloth, while flooding India and the world with cheaper fabric from the new satanic steam mills of Britain.

Weavers became beggars, manufacturing collapsed; the population of Dhaka, which was once the great centre of muslin production, fell by 90%.

So instead of a great exporter of finished products, India became an importer of British ones, while its share of world exports fell from 27% to 2%.

'Clive of India'

Colonialists like Robert Clive bought their "rotten boroughs" in England with the proceeds of their loot in India (loot, by the way, was a Hindi word they took into their dictionaries as well as their habits), while publicly marvelling at their own self-restraint in not stealing even more than they did.

And the British had the gall to call him "Clive of India", as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that much of the country belonged to him.

Bengal famine

As Britain ruthlessly exploited India, between 15 and 29 million Indians died tragically unnecessary deaths from starvation.

The last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule; none has taken place since, since free democracies don't let their people starve to death.

Some four million Bengalis died in the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 after Winston Churchill deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and European stockpiles.

"The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks," he argued.

When officers of conscience pointed out in a telegram to the prime minister the scale of the tragedy caused by his decisions, Mr Churchill's only response was to ask peevishly "Why hasn't Gandhi died yet?"

Myth of 'enlightened despotism'

British imperialism had long justified itself with the pretence that it was enlightened despotism, conducted for the benefit of the governed. Mr Churchill's inhumane conduct in 1943 gave the lie to this myth.

But it had been battered for two centuries already: British imperialism had triumphed not just by conquest and deception on a grand scale, but by blowing rebels to bits from the mouths of cannons, massacring unarmed protesters at Jallianwala Bagh and upholding iniquity through institutionalised racism.

No Indian in the colonial era was ever allowed to feel British; he was always a subject, never a citizen.

Indian railways

The construction of the Indian Railways is often pointed to as a benefit of British rule, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries have built railways without having to be colonised to do so.

Nor were the railways laid to serve the Indian public. They were intended to help the British get around, and above all to carry Indian raw materials to the ports to be shipped to Britain.

The movement of people was incidental except when it served colonial interests; no effort was made to ensure that supply matched demand for mass transport.

In fact the Indian Railways were a big British colonial scam.

British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed extravagant returns on capital, paid for by Indian taxes.

Thanks to British rapacity, a mile of Indian railways cost double that of a mile in Canada and Australia.

It was a splendid racket for the British, who made all the profits, controlled the technology and supplied all the equipment, which meant once again that the benefits went out of India.

It was a scheme described at the time as "private enterprise at public risk". Private British enterprise, public Indian risk.

British aid

In recent years, even as the reparations debate has been growing louder, British politicians have in fact been wondering whether countries like India should even receive basic economic aid at the expense of the British taxpayer.

To begin with, the aid received is 0.4%, which is less than half of 1% of India's GDP.

British aid, which is far from the amounts a reparation debate would throw up, is only a fraction of India's fertiliser subsidy to farmers, which may be an appropriate metaphor for this argument.

Britons may see our love of cricket or the English language, or even parliamentary democracy, conjuring up memories of the Raj as in television series like Indian Summers, with Simla, and garden parties, and gentile Indians.

For many Indians, however, it is a history of loot, massacres, bloodshed, of the banishing of the last Mughal emperor on a bullock cart to Burma.

Indian soldiers in world wars

India contributed more soldiers to British forces fighting the First World War than Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa combined.

Despite suffering recession, poverty and an influenza epidemic, India's contributions in cash and materiel amount to £8bn ($12bn) in today's money.

Two and a half million Indians also fought for British forces in the Second World War, by the end of which £1.25bn of Britain's total £3bn war debt was owed to India, which was merely the tip of the iceberg that was colonial exploitation.

It still hasn't been paid.

'Return the Koh-i-Noor diamond'

What's important is not the quantum of reparations that Britain should pay, but the principle of atonement.

Two hundred years of injustice cannot be compensated for with any specific amount.

I, for one, would be happy to accept a symbolic pound a year for the next two hundred years, as a token of apology.

And maybe Britain could kindly return the Koh-i-Noor diamond to the country it was taken from!

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Viewpoint: Britain must pay reparations to India

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Indian politician and writer Shashi Tharoor on why Britain needs to compensate India for exploiting it as a colony.

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Why Britain does not owe reparations to India

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Why Britain does not owe reparations to India

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At the end of May, the Oxford Union held a debate on the motion "This house believes Britain owes reparations to her former colonies". Speakers included Indian politician and writer Shashi Tharoor and British historian John MacKenzie. Mr Tharoor's argument in support of the motion has found favour among many Indians, where the subject of colonial exploitation remains a sore topic. Here, Professor MacKenzie, who spoke against the motion, offers his views.

Mr Shashi Tharoor is a remarkable man, a great ornament in India's diplomatic, political and literary life. He spoke at the Oxford Union reparations debate with great elegance and wit, but he overstated the case.

And he is wrong about reparations.

Having just emerged from editing a four-volume encyclopaedia of all empires in human history, I can say categorically that no empires have pursued tender or altruistic policies.

Empires happen because of imbalances in environmental opportunities, military and technological power, or capacities for state centralisation.

Or sometimes all three and more of those. And they always, without fail, pursue policies that benefit the rulers.

It would be quite wrong to create a myth of a peaceful "Merrie India" in the pre-British period.

Enriching the elite

India has been subjected to imperial formations for much of its history. In each case, people have been dominated for the benefit of the rulers.

This was certainly true of the Mughal Empire which preceded the British.

Countless people died in famines during the Mughal period, not least during the period when the Taj Mahal in Agra was being built.

Much of Indian wealth was creamed off for the benefit of rulers.

If it is true that it did not necessarily leave India, it is also true that it enriched a tiny elite, which certainly used military power and massacre and bloodshed to maintain their power. The militarisation of the Indian landscape with forts is evidence of this.

Over millennia of history, the locus of power and wealth has shifted back and forth.

When Europeans began their expansionist urges in the 1500s and 1600s, there can be no doubt at all that the great Asiatic Empires - the Ottoman, the Mughal and the Chinese - were much more powerful. It was only in the 18th Century that Europeans began to secure dominance. Now in the post-European age, the locus of power is moving back again.

European power was confirmed by wholly new forms of mechanised industrialisation.

When Mr Tharoor uses the word and suggests that Indian "industries" were destroyed, he is writing about two completely different things.

Indian "industries", while highly skilled in producing fine textiles, were essentially about craft production with relatively low levels of scale and technology.

European industrial production was unassailable worldwide because of the cheapness of the product. Craft production like handloom weaving was destroyed everywhere, including in Britain itself.

Weavers' thumbs

I am not sure of Mr Tharoor's source for the cutting off of weavers' thumbs.

It is not something I have heard of. What can certainly be said is that this was never official policy. If it happened at all, it must have been a localised, unofficial and illegal activity.

And if this practice had been publicised, it would have produced a storm of protest in Britain. Later in the 19th Century the British came to admire Indian crafts and argued that their values should be imported to the United Kingdom.

As with so much of the argument, the question of railways is largely correct, but some economic historians have suggested that Indian railways would have cost a great deal more if indigenous developers had had to seek capitalisation on world markets and buy in technology in a wholly unprotected way.

The fact is that India has one of the greatest railway networks in the world, a network which helped to bind the country together and, ironically, permit Congress nationalists to move around developing opposition to the British.

Britain also developed Western-style universities, a Western-style press, and a large publishing sector.

This placed the written word in the hands of much wider sectors of the population and, in all cases, served to promote political opposition to the British. It must remain doubtful that traditional Indian elites would have done this. Mr Tharoor is a great product of this shift to bourgeois learning.

We should also remember that in some areas, Indian industrialisation actually destroyed the British equivalents.

An excellent example lies in jute manufacture.

Raw jute was exported to Scotland for manufacture in the city of Dundee. Already by the end of the 19th Century, Dundee's skilled workers and managers, imagining that there was room for all production, and pursuing their own personal interests, took the technology to Calcutta and the surrounding areas.

By World War One, Indian production was already much cheaper than British and the jute factories of Dundee went into steep decline, producing considerable misery for its population.

The British government did nothing to prevent this and Indian industry triumphed over British. To a certain extent it happened in other sectors too.

There can be little doubt that the British, by ultimately forcing the princely states into the independent state of India, helped to unify India while at the same time partitioning it and, it might be argued, protecting it from the tensions and problems that a much larger Muslim population might have produced.

Unifying language

The British did offer English as a unifying language, which certainly helped the survival of Indian democracy.

In the last years of their rule the British spent millions on the new capital at New Delhi, an imperial folly which left India with one of the greatest capitals in the world.

Today India has a major globalising middle class with tastes and pursuits (tourism for example) to match.

Bangalore has seen a tremendous amount of "outsourcing" of such functions as "call centres" which, together with its remarkable response to the opportunities of the latest digital technologies, has ensured that the balance has shifted in India's favour. British companies fostering this have indulged in a form of reparations.

Only one major country in the world responded to Western industrialism and modernism without the imposition of imperial control or its equivalent and that was Japan, a country quite unlike India in its geographical formation, the relative uniformity of its peoples, and its common culture and religion.

Even Japan had the stimulus of the treaty ports which introduced Western-style trade, ship-building and technologies.

It can indeed be said that India's share of world GDP declined dramatically between, say, 1800 and 1947, but it must be remembered that economic revolutions, massive shifts in world population, and the dramatic expansion of other economies were all taking place throughout Europe, in the United States, in Latin America, Australasia, and the Far East during this period.

This great collapse in share was only partly due to British rule, but has to be seen largely in terms of great global shifts and stunning economic growth.

It was my argument in the Oxford Union debate that reparations were not the right answer, that they were essentially an impractical solution.

Ill omens

Precedents, such as [former Italian prime minister Silvio] Berlusconi's agreement with [former Libyan leader Muammar] Gaddafi, are ill omens. The calculation of reparations, their payment, ensuring that they went in the direction of the poorer in society, and their contribution to economic growth for all, would all be fraught with difficulties.

Atonement? Historians have been offering atonement through their writings for years and many superb Indian historians have taken up and sometimes modified these themes. Academic historians have considerable influence on the education of European, American and other elites.

All are fully aware of the iniquities and damage of imperialism (perhaps slavery is the worst example). We all seek atonement while recognising that the past is past and that we must guard against some of the modern equivalents of imperial exploitation that are still amongst us. Economic growth and improvements in health and social life must come from aid, support, fair and free trade.

The Koh-i-Noor diamond is a strange example for Mr Tharoor to use. It is surely absolutely symbolic of some unproductive aspects of Hinduism, as well as the power of earlier elites who had oppressed India just as much as the British.

John MacKenzie is emeritus professor of imperial history at Lancaster University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh

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Viewpoint: Why Britain does not owe reparations to India

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British historian John MacKenzie on why Britain does not owe reparations to India.