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The days when India was colonized by the British were very tragic, and it could be called "three feet high" and "geese plucking hair".
The British in India: Looting in name only
How did the British loot India? As early as the 18th century, the British began a systematic squeeze on India. As early colonists, the British way of looting was quite simple and crude - Ming robbery. For example, after the decisive victory of the British conquest of India, the Battle of Placi, they rushed into the Bengal capital of Moshedabad and looted everything of value in it. Nearly £60 million worth of gold and silver jewelry were recovered from the treasury of the Moshedabad court alone. Of this treasure, £37 million went into the pockets of the British government, and another 21 million went into the pockets of the British East India Company.
Of course, Ming Rush is too low-level. After the British successfully controlled the Indian region, the British East India Company, as the representative of British imperialism, officially began to rule India. During this period, the East India Company arguably monopolized all the profitable industries in the region for huge profits. More importantly, the East India Company promoted the Chemindar (tax collector) system, which, in simple terms, was the British East India Company's tax-packed looting of land in their jurisdiction by procuring various local agents. In addition to extracting ten percent of the commission from the tax package, these tax collectors also enjoy the right to collect land on one-twentieth of the land in the tax package area. Even more egregiously, these people can also turn their own jurisdictions into hereditary territories, exploiting the peasants on the land for generations. That is, the British sucked blood from these puppets, and the puppets sucked blood from the local people. Under this layer of pressure, what kind of life the local people live can be imagined.
How much wealth did the East India Company loot from India? According to a tabular record submitted to the British Parliament at the time, the East India Company and its staff looted £6 million from India in the decade from 1757 to 1766. Note that the degree of British looting in India is increasing year by year, and the means are becoming more and more brutal. From 1769 to 1770, in order to obtain higher profits, the East India Company even deliberately hoarded grain to sell at high prices, resulting in more than 10 million people starving to death in Bengal alone, and an average of one in every three people was starved alive. The human tragedy here stunned even British journalists and tourists, who recorded that "the plains here are almost whitened by bones."
Report on the mortality rate of women and children in the Mumbai barracks in 1858. Source/HCPP
For the British colonists, though, something similar had already happened to Ireland once.
Between 1757 and 1815, the British plundered up to a billion pounds of wealth from India, with an average of 10 million taels of silver per year going into the pockets of the British.
Called reform, it is actually better to squeeze
The long period of colonial rule made the Indians miserable, and they themselves were powerless to change anything, but then the British themselves began to make some reforms. It wasn't that they suddenly found out in their conscience that they were worried about how many people had starved to death in India, but mainly that the American Revolutionary War had made the British think that they should change their attitude towards the colonies. Britain's tyrannical conquests in the North American colonies eventually sparked a revolt among the local population and led to American independence. The defeat made the British reflect on their own behavior in the colonies, and in order to prevent the emergence of a second American, the British had to begin reforms in their colonies. In addition, the various actions of the East India Company could no longer be tolerated by the British government, because a large amount of corruption directly caused the loss of British finances, especially in view of the high financial expenditure brought about by the maintenance of British global hegemony, which made the British government intolerable. Driven by various reasons, after the independence of the United States in 1783, the British government finally reformed other colonies, including India, of course.
In 1784, the famous Indian Act was passed, according to which the East India Company had to be controlled by a parliamentary supervisory authority appointed by the King of England. At the same time, the British also changed their previous banditry style of wanton conquest and violence to a more "civilized" way of exploiting India.
The first manifestation of "civilization" is, first of all, to stop using military methods to simply grab money. The British colonists changed this approach and instead took advantage of the industrial advantages of the industrial revolution to dump capitalism. At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, it was the period of great development of British capitalism, a period characterized by the urgent need for a reliable market for dumping of goods produced by Britain, when the populous colony of India naturally became the preferred target of the British.
In 1794-1813, for example, British textiles exported to India grew from 156 pounds to 108824 pounds, a 700-fold increase. These high-quality and inexpensive goods completely destroyed India's indigenous textile industry, leaving a large number of Indian textile workers unemployed and starving, but britain made amazing wealth during this period. By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain's annual net income in British India had reached 44 million pounds, and 16 million pounds had been repatriated to Britain in the form of taxes, becoming one of Britain's main sources of finance, and the rest was huge market gains.
Accounts of silk fabrics imported from within the scope of the Articles of Incorporation of the East India. Source/HCPP
How much is this wealth worth? It is calculated in terms of silver two, which is more familiar to Chinese. The largest reparation in the late Qing Dynasty was the "Gengzi Reparations" in the Treaty of Xinugu. At that time, the value of one or two pieces of silver could be converted into 0.15 pounds, which can be calculated that the total net income of the United Kingdom in India at that time was 293.33 million taels of silver, that is, 106.66 million taels of silver were remitted to the British mainland, which became an important boost to the development of British capitalism. The £44 million gain is not the UK's total revenue in India, but net income excluding costs. If the total revenue is calculated, the British government's one-and-a-half-year fiscal surplus in British India is almost equivalent to a henzi reparation.
In 1837-1838, British India had a total revenue of 20.86 million pounds and spent only 17.55 million pounds. At pre-Opium War exchange rates, British India's annual revenue was two to three times that of the Qing Dynasty during the same period. It should be noted that the population and economic size of the Qing Dynasty were undoubtedly larger than those of British India. By contrast, the rulers of Bengal in the late eighteenth century levied no more than £800,000 a year. However, in the three decades after the British took over, the annual levy reached 2.68 million pounds. This is more than 3 times the tax rate of the original rulers, which shows the high level of looting by the British and the suffering of the local people.
Colonial Indian streets. Source/Screenshot of the documentary The British Empire
Let India be used by the British
Marx put it this way in "The Domination of Britain in India": "The catastrophe brought about by the British invasion of Hindustan is undoubtedly of a different nature compared with all the disasters of Hindustan's past, and to an extent I do not know how much heavier it is. ”
But some people wonder why the Indians did not resist when the British were so frenzied in their raids of India? Even the famous Indian "native rebellion" was due to religious issues. There are rumors that the bullets distributed were coated with cow fat and lard, which greatly stimulated the nerves of the "native soldiers", which triggered the uprising.
Why are the Indian people so submissive? This is still due to the domination of the old colonial powers. After several large-scale colonial uprisings, the British colonists realized that military repression was not a long-term solution.
How can the colonial people be willing to serve themselves? The British colonists cultivated a group of native pro-British factions to indirectly rule the locals. Beginning in 1813, the British spent more than Rs 100,000 a year on educating Indians, in an effort to produce a class of "senior Indians". By bribing this class of Indians, the British succeeded in placing India under their firm rule. To this day, these Indian elites remain the backbone of Indian society. The Education and Infrastructure of the British in India seems to promote India's development, but it is essentially serving the British.
More importantly, the British used Indian money to feed Indian soldiers and then cast these puppets into a new colonial war. For example, when the British invaded Afghanistan, most of the British soldiers were Indians. When the Eight-Power Coalition invaded China, Indian soldiers participated in a large number of them. In the famous Battle of Bali Bridge, the British cavalry unit that defeated the Mongol cavalry was the Indian Sikh cavalry.
It can be said that the British not only looted enough money from India, but also looted enough cannon fodder to play a huge role in their southern conquest of the northern war. At the time, the British themselves said that India was the brightest jewel in the British crown.
In the late nineteenth century, many British insightful people recognized the fact that "as long as we rule India, we are the first in the world." If we lose India, we will become a third-rate country. ”
Walk on a tightrope with British colonists
How did the British lose India? After all, the British population was one-twentieth the size of India, and their colonial rule was a long tightrope walk, and all the tricks could not hide the fact that Indians would one day wake up. So, it was the British themselves who trained gravediggers for themselves.
The British educated a group of Indian intellectuals, who became the first group of Hindu nationalist awakeners. Perhaps at the beginning, Indian intellectuals were still grateful for the cultivation of the British, but these people will eventually find that they are Indians, not British, and no matter how hard they try, in the eyes of the British, they are never their own.
During World War II, the British had a joke: "Kill the last Indian, or Britain will never surrender." This sentence really hurts the self-esteem of Indians. At this time, the Indian soldiers in the British ranks were ready to move. During World War II, there was a great famine in India, and the British still wantonly plundered wealth from India, resulting in a large number of Indians starving to death. In this regard, Churchill, then British Prime Minister, also said unashamedly: "Since Gandhi has not yet starved to death, there is no famine in India." This attitude made indians serving in the British army realize that the suzerainty they had so desperately supported had no feelings for them. As the Indian military grew more and more centrifugal, the British government began to feel that its rule over India was beginning to collapse.
Meanwhile, the Indian independence movement under Gandhi's leadership was already in full swing. At this time, the "Empire that never sets" has lost the strength to call the wind and rain around the world. The blows of the two world wars have greatly damaged the strength of the British Empire, which is already full of holes.
Gandhi and the people. Source/Screenshot of the movie Gandhi
Later, both the United States and the Soviet Union were disgusted with British colonial rule. Irish-Americans, who have great influence in American politics, are the descendants of the Irish who fled to the United States after being persecuted by Britain. These people have a sharp hatred for Britain, and they want the British to fall completely. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, hated Britain's reactionary colonial rule even more. Under the joint pressure of the United States and the Soviet Union, in 1944, Britain changed the "Empire of the Sun Never Sets" to the "British Commonwealth", ending the imperial state.
In 1946, India became independent. The "brightest jewel in the British crown" was completely freed from the brutal oppression of the British colonists, and the oriental magic that maintained the strength of the British Empire disappeared.
Looking back at history, the brutal rule of the British has caused India to suffer extremely heavy losses. According to the Indian economist Utsa Patnaik, between 1765 and 1938, the British took nearly $45 trillion from India, and such a high transfer of wealth provided great support for the rise of the British Empire and also caused Indians to suffer great tragedies.
Resources:
(India) En k singha, N.K., (India) A. K. Banazi, A.C. General History of India[M]. The Commercial Press, 1973.
Brian Lapping; Translated by Qian Chengdan et al. Imperial Slanting Sun[M]. Shanghai:Shanghai People's Publishing House, 1996.04.
Li Wenye. History of India- From the Mughal Empire to Indian Independence[M]. Shenyang:Liaoning University Press, 1998.07.
(d) Karl. Marx. British Rule in India[A], The Complete Works of Marx and Engels: Volume 9[M].Beijing: People's Publishing House, 1961.
Churchill (W.S.); Xue Limin, Lin Lin, trans. History of English-speaking countries[M]. Beijing:Xinhua Publishing House, 1985.02.
Source: National Human History
Author: Guo Xin
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