By Vedika Sakhardande, Deputy Editor
British colonialism in India is accredited with globalizing the Indian economy and building modern cultural institutions and forms of social structures that put it on the path to growth. This colonial encounter is perceived as a defining moment in India’s history and in the eyes of some critics an encounter that set it up for integration with the modern world. A 2014 YouGov poll found that 59% of the respondents thought the British Empire was “something to be proud of” and only 19% were “ashamed” of its misdeeds. But did colonialism really enhance India’s economic and social structures in a way its absence could not have? This article challenges the validity of treating British colonization as the sole accelerator of the growth of India and visualizes what the country might have looked like in its absence.
As Amartya Sen points out, in the absence of British rule, India would not have remained the same as it was at the time of the Battle of Plassey. India’s state would have undoubtedly changed under the influences of its own internal dynamics and from the influences of countries in the Far East that it was in close contact with. The critical question by Sen however is whether India would have modernized like Japan or remained resistant to change like Afghanistan. The answer to this question, according to him, lies in the study of the socio-economy of India before the British.
Source
The Battle of Plassey marked the start of the British colonization of India
India had a thriving economy with flourishing trade and commerce before the colonial period. This was even acknowledged by British observers such as Adam Smith. As Andre Gunder Frank explains, common global expansion around the Indian Ocean since 1400 benefitted Asian centres earlier and more than it did Europe, Africa and the Americas. India being the geographic and economic centre of the Indian Ocean had one of the most highly developed and dominant textile industries in the world even before the Mughal conquest. However, India began to fall behind what was achieved by Europe by the mid-18th CE mainly due to its distance from the renaissance and industrialisation in Europe. As Marx writes in his essay ‘The British Rule in India’ through the primary western contact of Britain, India experienced a slowly emerging indigenous globalized culture. India is said to have moved to a stage of modern economic growth during colonization. However, facts betray this presumption. Crop yields in 1595 were higher compared to those of 1910. The average Indian lived only at a basic subsistence level from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Rising trade with the European trading companies did not create prosperity and in fact, coincided with a decrease in living standards. Before the granting of trading rights to the East India Company, India had a monopoly in the production of cotton textiles. However, with British political control of India, this industry was slowly destroyed owing to Indian raw materials being exported to Britain and cheaper machine-made textile goods being sold in the Indian market. As the historian William Dalrymple has observed in 1600 (before the founding of the East India Company) Britain generated 1.8% of the world’s GDP while India produced 22.5% of it. By the peak of the Raj, these figures had more or less reversed and India was reduced from the world’s leading manufacturer to a symbol of famine and deprivation. We can therefore reasonably conceive that though India may have forged global ties at a slower rate without British occupation, there would have greater scope for its industries especially the textile and cotton industries and a better livelihood for its masses. Other than industries, crop yields from agriculture would have been higher without the British system of land ownership which led to a series of famines. Around the time of independence, India would have displayed a stronger export sector, improved poverty conditions and better industrial capacity than that exhibited post the Raj.
The figure reflects falling wages of urban unskilled workers (measured in terms of grain)
Another key achievement accorded to Britain was the production of a ‘united’ India which helped it function as a nation with a homogenous identity and common socio-economic goals. Yet, as Sen explains, there is a great leap from the proximate story of Britain imposing a single united regime on India to the claim that only the British could have created a united India out of disparate states. There is a precedence of consolidation of Empires in India from the Guptas to the Mughals and this tradition was likely to continue before the British interference. One possible outcome could have been the acquisition of rulership by the growing Maratha powers in the West. Another set of achievements then accorded to the British was the establishment of principles of democracy and rule of law within the country. A key criticism of this theory however is that Imperialism itself requires a degree of tyranny which is not conducive to the development of systems of free press and public voting. Democracy was then a public demand derived out of poor governance by the British and taken up by the masses as a means of improvement of their livelihoods and protecting their birthrights of liberty. Democracy could then have still been an important part of the Indian lexicon derived from a public desire for systematic reorganisation. In fact, before British rule, there existed several indigenous forms of local governance that promoted principles such as social good for the masses which are parallel to that of a democracy.
Source
Divergence in GDP per capita of India and Britain
The British role in the promotion of globalization and democracy therefore cannot be pinned as an exclusive characteristic of Imperialism. However, there were several structural inhibitors that British colonial rule brought to India. These instances of plunder and exploitation are at a massive scale and are unique to the colonial experience. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by depredations in India. India was used as a source of cheap raw materials and a ready market for British exports and a source of highly paid employment for British civil servants which ‘drained’ its wealth under colonization. There was a deconstruction of Indian textiles and their replacement by British manufacturers. The population of Dhaka, a once great centre of Muslin production fell by 90%. The world share of Indian exports fell from 27% to 2%. An estimated 15 to 29 million Indians died tragically from unnecessary deaths caused by starvation and famines. Poor allocation of food resources and the exploitative Zamindari system decimated stockpiles of food and handicapped agricultural production. Even the railways, a symbol of British benefit to India, were used to carry Indian raw materials to the ports to be shipped to Britain and built using capital extracted from Indian taxes. A mile of Indian railways cost double that of Canada and Australia. At the time of Independence, the life expectancy at birth was only 32 years and adult literacy was barely at 15%. India was a ‘third-world’ poor country faced with 90% of the population living below the poverty line faced with starvation, poverty and famine.
Source
Railways serve as a symbol of British-led development of India however there are several under-analysed aspects of this relation
The link between colonialism and the modernisation of India can thus be challenged and an alternate conception of the Indian economy can be visualized. Without the burden of colonialism, India might have had a richness of domestic industry and indigenous local governance that gave way to a more inclusive democracy. With greater export potential and resources for development, the country would have had a bigger base post-WWII for development and would not have been relegated to a lower growth path.
REFERENCES
- Illusions of empire: Amartya Sen on what British rule really did for India | India | The Guardian
- ‘But what about the railways …?’ The myth of Britain’s gifts to India | Colonialism | The Guardian
- India in the World Economy, 1400-1750
- Population and Standards of Living in Akbar’s Time – Ashok V. Desai, 1972
- Wages, prices, and living standards in China, 1738–1925: in comparison with Europe, Japan, and India1
- Robert Clive was a vicious asset-stripper. His statue has no place on Whitehall | William Dalrymple | The Guardian
- Forerunners of Dadabhai Naoroji’s Drain Theory | Economic and Political Weekly
- Viewpoint: Britain must pay reparations to India – BBC News.
- Local Self-Government in India
- Churchill’s policies contributed to 1943 Bengal famine – study | India | The Guardian
Arthashastra 