Benevolent rulers really? British looted trillions

Maqsood Maniyar | NT

Bengaluru: There are some who beieve that British rule or 'benevolent colonialism' for 300 years was beneficial to India - a theory which has been slammed and scoffed at in the past but its ghost keeps reappearing warranting fresh rebuttals.

Even an elementary study would reveal that India’s share in the world economy was a full 22.6 per cent in 1700 in comparison to the collective share of Europe, which was 23.3 per cent.

When the British left India, India's share was a pitiful 3.8 per cent. So where did all the wealth go?

The average life expectancy of an Indian was a mere 32 years in 1947 and is 70 years now. Merely 16 per cent of Indians were literate on the eve of Independence. Today, that figure stands at 77.70 per cent. There were only 20 universities and 496 colleges under colonial India despite th best 'educating ' efforts of the British.

In 2023, there are 1,074 universities with 242 of them coming up in the last five years alone. The fact that the British brought with them some degree of industrialization does not make sense when raw materials were siphoned out of the country in systematic deindustrialization.

For instance, raw cotton among other materials were shipped out to Britain and finished goods were brought back to the Indian market, devastating local artisans.

In the middle ages, typically a third of the yield was charged as tax by the ruling class in what was an agrarian economy. Under the British, taxes were not on the produce alone and instead the land was taxed as it had to be leased.

Up to 3 million died in Bengal famine

The Bengal famine of 1943 killed anywhere between 800,000 to three million people. This was in great part because of the British policy of stockpiling grains due to a fear of a Japanese invasion on the eastern front since the imperial East Asian nation had already seized Singapore and Myanmar.

The colonialists also exported a massive amount of grain to their troops in the Middle East.

Academic critique of British in India

The final word, however, can’t just be narration of facts but rather an academic approach toward the understanding of colonialism. Figures like RP Dutt laid the groundwork with his masterpiece India Today.

Dadabhai Naroji came up with the Drain Theory. More recently, economist Utsa Patnaik in her collection of essays published by the Columbia University Press in 2018 estimated that in a matter of 200 years, the British extracted $44.6 trillion from India.

Marxist theories narrate exploitation, regeneration

Mysore University political science professor Muzaffar Assadi said that the Marxist perspective set the ball rolling for critique of colonialism.

“RP Dutt divided colonial rule into three phases: Mercantile capitalist phase, followed by industrial phase and then the last phase is finance capitalist phase. In all these three phases, we were exploited,” he said.

“But on the other hand if you read the original texts by Marx, particularly when he was writing for The New York Tribune, on the 1857 war, he had two perceptions. One is that of the destruction by the colonialists and the second is regeneration,” he added.

Assadi said that the “liberal nationalists” argue that the British introduced modernization in the subcontinent but he reasoned that once the colony became too expensive to maintain they decided to leave.

“Their agenda was to subjugate, appropriate and ruin India, which they successfully did right from 1757 up until 1920 or 30. Later on, they found that India was becoming unprofitable or uneconomical for them. It was becoming a burden for them. So they wanted to get out of India. Mentally, they were preparing for a transfer of power,” the professor said.