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The colonisation happened due to imbalances in environmental opportunities, military and technological power.
(Cosima)

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Japan made profit out of the Western industialisation like India did. (Cosima)

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→ the militarisation of the Indian landscape with forts is evidence of this (Seika)

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- countless people died in famines during the Mughal period
- much of Indian wealth was creamed off for the benefit of rulers
(Seika)

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enriched parts of Indian society (Dania)

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The British built universities and schools  and invested in education
(Dania)

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The cost of Indian railways would have been much higher, if indigenous developers had to seek capital on the world market and bought in technology in a wholly unprotected way. (Yuhan)

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Many Indian soldiers had to fight for Britain, for example in the Second World War.
(Franziska)

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- for the British and to carry Indian raw materials to the ports for shipping it to Britain
- it was only used for colonial interests
- British investors made much money with the railways
(Franziska)

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Colonialists exploited Indians and they made it look like they were doing good for India (for example Robert Clive).
(Franziska)

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The buildings and innovations helped India to become independent
(Antonia)

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were used to transport raw material
and British people (Hendrik)

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-no Indian in colonial era was allowed to feel British
-only a subject, not Citizen  (Hendrik)

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-15-29million people died of unnecessary starvation
-Winston Churchill: diversion of food from starving Indian to
well-supplied British soldier (4million deaths)
-the last starvation in India was under British rule (Hendrik)

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-Britain destroyed Indian textiles and fabrics
-Indian world export fell from 27% to 2%
-from exporter to the world to exporter to Britain (Hendrik)

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British intercede in the Indian government / Protection
(Taha)

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More assertiveness for the British (Taha)

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Trade network is being extended ( Taha)

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territorial boundaries can be extended in India (Taha)

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India had 23% of the world economy –> dropped to 4%
Reason: India governed for the benefits of Britain
India biggest „cash-cow“ for Britain (Hendrik)

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The consequences are very huge and can not only be solved by money but pay reparations would be a beginning. (Marlena)

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-British invested much money in the country
->new capital at New Delhi
(Anton)

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-English as a unifying language
->helped to stabilize Indian democracy (Anton)

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-Indian industrialisation destroyed British equivalents (jute)
(Anton)

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-the British built Western-style universities, a Western-style press, and a large publishing sector
->financial security (Anton)

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-Indians were oppressed, but not hurt (Anton)

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-Indian crafts were exported to Britain (money flow to India) (Anton)

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-British industrialisation lead to destroyed craft production everywhere (not only in India) (Anton)

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-grabbed money kept in India; it was only distributed (Anton)

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-colonialism enriches a tiny elite (Anton)

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-Indians were suppressed & died unter Mughal-leadership (Anton)

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-policies always benefit rulers (Anton)

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-no empire in human history has pursued altruistic policies (Anton)

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- the British built canals and streets (Mr Materne)

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Why Britain does not owe reparations to India (Hawez-Wolf)

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Why Britain does not owe reparations to India (Hawez-Wolf)

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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.

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Britain must pay reparations to India (Al-Asadi-Grießbach)

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Britain must pay reparations to India (Al-Asadi-Grießbach)

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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.