Colonialism:

Colonialism is defined as “control by one power over a dependent area or

people.” In practice, colonialism is when one country violently invades and takes
control of another country, conquering its population and exploiting it, often
while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people and claiming
the land as its own.

History of Colonialism:
There were two great waves of colonialism in recorded history. The first wave
began in the 15th century, during Europe’s Age of Discovery. During this time,
European countries such as Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal colonized lands
across North and South America.

The second wave of colonial expansion began during the 19th century, centering
on the African continent. In what is called the Scramble for Africa, European
nations such as Britain, France, Portugal, and Spain sliced up the continent like a
pie, creating arbitrary borders and boundaries, and claiming large swaths of land
for themselves. These artificial borders split cultural groups, resulting in fierce
ethnic tensions that have had devastating ramifications throughout the continent.
Indigenous political, economic, and social institutions were decimated, as were
traditional ways of life, which were deemed inferior.

By 1914, a large majority of the world's nations had been colonized by

Europeans at some point.
The motivations for the first wave of colonial expansion can be summed up
as God, Gold, and Glory: God, because missionaries felt it was their moral duty to
spread Christianity, and they believed a higher power would reward them for
saving the souls of colonial subjects; gold, because colonizers would exploit
resources of other countries in order to bolster their own economies; and glory,
since European nations would often compete with one another over the glory of
attaining the greatest number of colonies.

Another significant motivation for all European colonization in different parts of

the world is almost always ignored. It was an inherent ideology of “western
supremacy”. This idea is often referred to as “the white man’s burden”: a self-
proclaimed responsibility of the west to subjugate and civilize any other person,
who does not fall under the category of the “west”.

Colonial logic also asserted that a place did not exist unless white people had seen
it and testified to its existence, but European colonists did not
actually discover any land. The “New World,” as it was first called by Amerigo
Vespucci, an Italian navigator and cartographer, was not new at all: People had
been living and thriving in the Americas for centuries.

Yet, in many history books, Europe’s expansion is remembered as exploration,

and the men who helmed ships that landed in foreign countries — and proceeded
to commit violence and genocide against native peoples — are remembered as
heroes. One of these men, an Italian explorer named Christopher Columbus, even
has a federally recognized holiday to honor him. Columbus thought he was on his
way to Asia, but found himself in the Caribbean instead. The first indigenous
people he came across were the Taíno, who accounted for the majority of people
living on the island of Hispaniola (which is now divided into Haiti and the
Dominican Republic). They had a highly evolved and complex culture. But this did
not stop Columbus from claiming the island and its inhabitants for Spain. By 1550,
a mere 58 years after he first landed on the island, what was once a thriving
culture and community was severely decimated by European diseases and the
brutality of a newly instated slave economy.

Colonization of India (1615-1947)

One of the main reasons for the Europeans to sail the oceans was to find new
trade routes to Asia, especially, to India. The adventure was inevitable as the land
route to Asia was now held by the Ottoman Empire since 1453 CE (In 1453 CE,
Constantinople was captured by the Ottomans, which led to the fall of the
Byzantine Empire) and an alternative trade route had to be discovered, for the
sake of trade and profits.
The British first established trading posts in India, in order to purchase spices that
were much in demand in Britain and Europe. They first came to trade and not to
conquer. The Anglo-Indian trade was monopolized by the East India Company.
This was a company that was owned by private shareholders, including wealthy
merchants and aristocrats. Over time, the company earned spectacular profits
from the trade with India and they became increasingly influential in the affairs of
Britain. They eventually even established a private army, at first to defend its
interests, but later they were used for offensive purposes.

East India Company:

In 1600, the East India Company was originally chartered to trade basic
commodities such as silk, tea, salt opium and spices from India to Europe. Over
time the East India Company radically transformed itself from a trading company
into an entity that controlled a massive empire in India. Britain, through the East
India Company, was able to dominate the Indian sub-continent that includes
modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka from the 1750s. The British
effectively ruled the sub-continent for almost two centuries.
How East India Company worked?
The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a
portion of those revenues (about a third) to fund the purchase of Indian goods for
British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own
pocket, British traders acquired them for free, "buying" from peasants and
weavers using money that had just been taken from them.

It was a scam - theft on a grand scale. Yet most Indians were unaware of what was
going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one
who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been the same person, they surely
would have smelled a rat.

Some of the stolen goods were consumed in Britain, and the rest were re-
exported elsewhere. The re-export system allowed Britain to finance a flow of
imports from Europe, including strategic materials like iron, tar and timber, which
were essential to Britain's industrialization. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution
depended in large part on this systematic theft from India.

On top of this, the British were able to sell the stolen goods to other countries for
much more than they "bought" them for in the first place, pocketing not only 100
percent of the original value of the goods but also the markup.

Britain used the windfall from this fraudulent system to fuel the engines of
imperial violence - funding the invasion of China in the 1840s and the suppression
of the Indian Rebellion in 1857. And this was on top of what the Crown took
directly from Indian taxpayers to pay for its wars. As Patnaik points out, "the cost
of all Britain's wars of conquest outside Indian borders were charged always
wholly or mainly to Indian revenues."

And that's not all. Britain used this flow of tribute from India to finance the
expansion of capitalism in Europe and regions of European settlement, like
Canada and Australia. So not only the industrialization of Britain but also the
industrialization of much of the Western world was facilitated by extraction from
the colonies.
Sepoy Mutiny (1857):
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 occurred as the result of an accumulation of factors
over time, rather than any single event.
It was led by "sepoys," or Bengal soldiers serving under the British.
The sepoys were Indian soldiers who were recruited into the Company's army.
Just before the rebellion, there were over 300,000 sepoys in the army, compared
to about 50,000 British. The forces were divided into three presidency
armies: Bombay, Madras, and Bengal. The Bengal Army recruited higher castes,
and even restricted the enlistment of lower castes in 1855. In contrast,
the Madras Army and Bombay Army were "more localized, caste-neutral armies"
that "did not prefer high-caste men". The domination of higher castes in the
Bengal Army has been blamed in part for initial mutinies that led to the rebellion.
The mutiny was caused by the sense that the British were exploiting the Indian
people and threatening to expunge traditional Indian culture. There were many
other factors, such as forced commercialization of farming, taxation, and others,
but these cultural concerns were profoundly important. The rebels, many of
whom were the Indian troops caught their employers off guard and succeeded in
killing many British soldiers, civilians and Indians loyal to the Company. In
retaliation for this uprising, the Company killed thousands of Indians, both rebel
combatants as well as a large number of civilians perceived to be sympathetic to
the uprising. This was the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
Some of the factors that developed the feelings of hatred among the Indian army
and civilians are given below:

English education

The British found out that the best possible way to enslave the minds of the
Indians was through the introduction of the English education. The indigenous
education system, which was referred to as “A beautiful tree” by Mahatma
Gandhi was dismantled and destroyed. A strong emphasis was given to teaching
the Indians about European literature, western art and languages, so as to make
the English speaking Indians alien to their own culture and traditions.
Thomas Babington Macaulay famously (or infamously rather) argued in his
“Minute on Indian Education” (2/2/1835) delivered in the British parliament that
the British had to do their best to create a class of individuals in India, who would
be Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, opinions, morals and intellect.
He, after discounting Indian culture, arts, languages, etc. as primitive and useless,
declared that an entire library of eastern literature is equivalent to just one shelf
of English literature.
To forward this cause, various seminaries were started to educate the Indian
youth in English and western literature. No doubt, these institutions provided the
much needed knowledge of modern sciences to young Indians, but at the same
time, they not only alienated these young Indians from their culture, but also
from indigenous knowledge systems (both science and arts). Thus, in a highly
systematic manner, English and everything associated with it was promoted and
made to replace India’s indigenous education system.
The result of these efforts was visible on the ground as early as 1838. While
noting the success of the new education policy, Trevelyan says that there has
been a wide taste for English among the youth trained in the Hindu college at
Calcutta and notes that the moral effect of the English education was so deep that
some of the Hindu youth born in noble families had developed an impatience for
the restrictions of Hinduism and also a disregard for its ceremonies and rituals. He
then notoriously predicts that another generation of such people would alter the
very fundamental notions and feelings of the Hindu community. This perhaps was
the first sign of self-alienation; our own people developing a sense of animosity
towards their own identities.
Swami Vivekananda rightly observes on the issue of English education that,

“The child is taken to school and the first thing he learns is that his father is a fool,
the second thing that his grandfather was a lunatic, the third thing that all his
teachers are hypocrites, the fourth that all his sacred books are a mass of lies. By
the time he reaches sixteen, he is a mass of negation, lifeless and boneless.”

Conversions
Another method used by the British to civilize Indians was to Christianize them.
When the East India Company was at the helm of affairs in India, many thinkers
such as Edmund and Burke had started to argue that the company has to consider
and take care of its moral responsibilities

But, the East India Company did not consider any of the above as it was wary of
openly supporting the Christian missions fearing that any religious interference
would lead to the awakening of the Indian which it did.

This stance of religious neutrality of the company was substantially challenged in

1813, when its charter was considered for renewal. It was argued that the
Christianization of the Indian people would bring them at par with other subjects
and also increase their loyalty to the masters in England.

After the changes made in 1813 the missionaries started coming to India in large
numbers declaring that the solution for the Darkness of the Indians was the
introduction of “light”. In 1853, the Queen proclaimed that the equality, which
the Indians would receive with their other counterpart subjects of the crown
would breathe a sense of religiousness, generosity and benevolence.

These developments made the missionaries an important hand of the British

administration in India. It also led to an unholy nexus wherein the missionaries
and the colonial masters implicitly (sometimes explicitly) supported each other.
The missionary writers through their over-exaggerated, one-sided atrocity
literatures propagated around the world that, if not for the British, India was on
the brink of falling into the grasp of barbarity and backwardness. They were, as
Mahatma Gandhi called Catherine Mayo, professional drain inspectors. The
poverty, diseases, etc., many of which were the direct results of British policies
were projected to be the effects of “Hindu Superstition”.

Moreover, the missionaries were allowed to open mission schools where

thousands of young Indian minds were educated.

All these made the Indians come to the conclusion that their religion was in
danger and this suspicion aroused the religious and social sentiment of the Hindus
against the British. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan admits that during the famines of 1837,
many orphans became Christians.
Political and Administrative Reasons

The expansionist and annexationist policies of the British power in India made all
the Indian rulers, big and small, Hindu and Muslim look with suspicion and
develop hatred towards the British power in India.

The Indians in general did not accept the administrative changes initiated and
implemented, as most of them were alien in nature and replaced the age-old
existing rules and regulations. Creation of a new administrative cadre,
replacement of Persian by English and the colonial rule which created hardships
to all sections of people and lack of personal touch between the ruler and the
ruled led to a sort of distrust in the administrative set-up. This distrust hardened
in due course as Indians were denied positions in all high civil and military jobs
which were reserved for the Europeans and in particular to the British.

Failure on the part of the British East India Company in honouring the provision of
1833 Charter Act that “no Indian shall by reason of his faith, place of birth,
descent, complexion or any of them, be disabled from holding any place, office or
employment under the East India Company”, convinced the educated Indians of
the arrogant racial hatred of the British towards the natives of India.

Economic Causes

Added to political and administrative distrust for the British East India Company,
the economic policies of the British resulted in impoverishing all the segments of
the Indian society except a handful of collaborators among the Indians. Owing to
their colonial policies of economic exploitation, industry, trade commerce and
agriculture languished and India became de-industrialized, impoverished and
debt-ridden, while, William Bentinck himself admitted that by 1833-34 “The
misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of cotton
weavers are bleaching the plains of India”.

As a result of the British economic exploitation all classes of people, peasants,

landlords, traders, industrialists, labourers and middle class of India were badly
affected and it is no exaggeration to state that unlimited poverty enveloped the
entire society and made India an underdeveloped country.
Social Causes

Indians were viewed by their white masters as racially inferior and culturally
backward. The British were so arrogant and haughty, that a police regulation
published by a magistrate at Agra categorically states “Every native, whatever his
pretended rank may be, ought to be compelled, under heavy penalties, to salaam
all English gentlemen in the streets and if the native is on horseback or in a
carriage, to dismount and stand in a respectful attitude until the European has
passed him.”

The intervention of the British in social traditions by prohibiting the practice of

Sati in 1829, passing laws relating to succession of property in 1832 and 1856,
Widow Remarriage Act in 1856 and the Religious Disabilities Act of 1856 further
strengthened the view of the conservatives that the Hindu religion and customs
were being tampered by the British with the specific objective of Christianizing
India. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan observes: “All persons, whether intelligent or
ignorant, respectable or otherwise, believed that the government was really and
sincerely desirous of interfering with the religion and customs of the people,
converting them all, whether Hindus or Muhammadans to Christianity and forcing
them to adopt the European manners and habits”.

The Enfield rifle

The final spark was provided by the ammunition for the new Enfield P-53
rifle These rifles, which fired Minié balls, had a tighter fit than the earlier muskets,
and used paper cartridges that came pre-greased. To load the rifle, sepoys had
to bite the cartridge open to release the powder. The grease used on these
cartridges was rumored to include tallow derived from beef, which would be
offensive to Hindus, and pork, which would be offensive to Muslims.
The mutiny ended the century of control by the East India Company and
instituted the system of Governance called the British Raj.

British Raj 1858:

After the British Raj took over in 1858, colonisers added a special new twist to the
tax-and-buy system. As the East India Company's monopoly broke down, Indian
producers were allowed to export their goods directly to other countries. But
Britain made sure that the payments for those goods nonetheless ended up in
London.

How did this work? Basically, anyone who wanted to buy goods from India would
do so using special Council Bills - a unique paper currency issued only by the
British Crown. And the only way to get those bills was to buy them from London
with gold or silver. So traders would pay London in gold to get the bills, and then
use the bills to pay Indian producers. When Indians cashed the bills in at the local
colonial office, they were "paid" in rupees out of tax revenues - money that had
just been collected from them. So, once again, they were not in fact paid at all;
they were defrauded.

Meanwhile, London ended up with all of the gold and silver that should have gone
directly to the Indians in exchange for their exports.

This corrupt system meant that even while India was running an impressive trade
surplus with the rest of the world - a surplus that lasted for three decades in the
early 20th century - it showed up as a deficit in the national accounts because the
real income from India's exports was appropriated in its entirety by Britain.

Britain intercepted enormous quantities of income that rightly belonged to Indian

producers. India was the goose that laid the golden egg. Meanwhile, the "deficit"
meant that India had no option but to borrow from Britain to finance its imports.
So the entire Indian population was forced into completely unnecessary debt to
their colonial overlords, further cementing British control.

Benefits and harms of Colonialism.

The Colonizers did not care that there were people already living on the land they
colonized. The majority did not want peace and harmony between cultures; they
wanted the land for themselves. They did not want to share the abundant
resources; they wanted to generate wealth to fill their own pockets. Most had no
respect for indigenous cultures or histories; they wanted to enforce their own
instead. These colonizers did not care that land was considered sacred and
communal. Most believed that everything, including the earth, was meant to be
bought and sold
Colonial governments did invest in infrastructure and trade and disseminated
medical and technological knowledge. In some cases, they encouraged literacy,
the adoption of Western human rights standards, and sowed the seeds for
democratic institutions and systems of government. Some former colonies, like
Ghana, experienced a rise in nutrition and health with colonial rule, and colonial
European settlement has been linked to some development gains.

However, coercion and forced assimilation often accompanied those gains, and
scholars still debate colonialism’s many legacies. Colonialism’s impacts
include environmental degradation, the spread of disease, economic
instability, ethnic rivalries, and human rights violations—issues that can long
outlast one group’s colonial rule.

Here are five ways in which British colonization harmed India,

1) Partition

Britain's most lasting and damaging colonial legacy in the sub-continent was the
partition of India into three countries: India, Pakistan and (eventually)
Bangladesh. Relations between these countries have been fraught ever since.

The partition led to one of the largest migrations in history, as many moved from
India to Pakistan and vice-versa. It displaced 15 million people, and killed more
than one million. When tensions boiled over in 1971, and Bangladesh fought for
its Independence from Pakistan, 500,000 people died.

The legacies of colonialism can still be felt today, as Pakistan and India remain at
loggerheads, despite a shared history which was shattered by British divide and
rule policies.
2) The Bengal Famine

Rather than benevolently ruling India as Roberts suggests, Britain oversaw some
of the worst famines in human history. The famine of Bengal on 1943 was so bad
that it's been likened to a genocide. Three million Indians starved to death. The
policies of Winston Churchill, who was prime minister at the time, were largely to
blame for the suffering. Britain exported huge amounts of food from India, all for
its own consumption. 70,000 tons of rice left the sub-continent between January
and July 1943.

Still not convinced? Churchill said this about the Bengal famine of 1943: “I hate
Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their
own fault for breeding like rabbits.”

3) The Amritsar Massacre

In April 1919 thousands of peaceful protesters demonstrated against British

colonial rule in Amritsar. They ended up being blocked into the walled Jallianwala
Gardens. Once there, British troops led by General Dyer opened fire
indiscriminately on the crowds, killing up to 1000 protesters. General Dyer was
later lauded a hero by the British public, which afterwards raised £26,000 for him
as a thank you.

4) British assistance in Operation Blue Star

Britain's negative impact on India didn't end after colonialism. Presenting itself as
a great ally of the region, Britain continued to meddle in Indian politics. The most
significant example of this was in 1984, when the British government advised the
Indian government over Operation Blue Star. The operation saw the Indian
government raid the Golden Temple – a holy site for Sikhs – which left hundreds
dead. Such an attack would be the equivalent of the Britain advising the Italian
government on attacking the Vatican.
The aftermath of this led to Indira Gandhi's assassination, and subsequent
backlashes against the Sikh populations of India that led to 2,000 Sikhs being
killed in Delhi. Only last year did Britain admit its role in it all.

5) The British seizure of Delhi in 1857

Britain's bloody rule of India was best encapsulated by the September 1857
seizure of Delhi during the now infamous Sepoy Mutiny. The British troops
murdered sepoy troops, as well as indiscriminately massacring civilians. One
young officer was apparently recorded as saying "the orders were to shoot every
soul... it was literally murder."

Conclusion:
There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonization of India - as
horrible as it may have been - was not of any major economic benefit to Britain
itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that
the empire was sustained for so long - the story goes - was a gesture of Britain's
benevolence.

New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik - just published by

Columbia University Press - deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on
nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that
Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to
1938.

It's a staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than the total
annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today.

The legacy of colonialism continues to manifest in obvious ways: Many of the

world’s poorest countries are former European colonies. Walter Rodney’s
groundbreaking book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa makes the claim that
poverty on the continent can be traced back to European exploitation of African
resources. In the United States, those living on reservations experience
extraordinarily high poverty, alcoholism, unemployment, and suicide rates.

In less obvious ways, the violence of colonial thinking continues to shape the
trajectories of countries that were once colonizers too. Colonizers believed the
world was theirs for the taking, saw the masses of people as disposable, and
believed that nothing mattered more than the currency in a white man’s pocket.
As the world’s top 1% continue to hoard the majority of the earth’s resources,
and the unending quest for profit trumps the needs of the majority of people, it
becomes clear that colonialism is not just a relic of the past.

Wherever colonialism has manifested in the world, from across the Americas to
every corner of the African continent, it has been met with a fierce struggle of
resistance. Throughout history, indigenous peoples have risen up and successfully
overthrown colonial powers, demonstrating that while colonizers could steal land
and resources, they could not take the dignity of a people determined to be free.