The country would not have stood still had the British conquest not occurred. But how do we answer the question about what difference was made by British rule? Now consider the possibility that Perry was not merely making a show of American strength as was in fact the case , but was instead the advance guard of an American conquest of Japan, establishing a new American empire in the land of the rising sun, rather as Robert Clive did in India. If we were to assess the achievements of the supposed American rule of Japan through the simple device of comparing Japan before that imperial conquest in with Japan after the American domination ended, whenever that might be, and attribute all the differences to the effects of the American empire, we would miss all the contributions of the Meiji restoration from onwards, and of other globalising changes that were going on.
Japan did not stand still; nor would India have done so. While we can see what actually happened in Japan under Meiji rule, it is extremely hard to guess with any confidence what course the history of the Indian subcontinent would have taken had the British conquest not occurred.
Would India have moved, like Japan, towards modernisation in an increasingly globalising world, or would it have remained resistant to change, like Afghanistan, or would it have hastened slowly, like Thailand? These are impossibly difficult questions to answer. And yet, even without real alternative historical scenarios, there are some limited questions that can be answered, which may contribute to an intelligent understanding of the role that British rule played in India.
We can ask: what were the challenges that India faced at the time of the British conquest, and what happened in those critical areas during the British rule? T here was surely a need for major changes in a rather chaotic and institutionally backward India.
India had also achieved considerable success in building a thriving economy with flourishing trade and commerce well before the colonial period — the economic wealth of India was amply acknowledged by British observers such as Adam Smith.
The fact is, nevertheless, that even with those achievements, in the midth century India had in many ways fallen well behind what was being achieved in Europe. The exact nature and significance of this backwardness were frequent subjects of lively debates in the evenings at my school. An insightful essay on India by Karl Marx particularly engaged the attention of some of us.
Writing in , Marx pointed to the constructive role of British rule in India, on the grounds that India needed some radical re-examination and self-scrutiny. The importance of this influence would be hard to neglect. The indigenous globalised culture that was slowly emerging in India was deeply indebted not only to British writing, but also to books and articles in other — that is non-English — European languages that became known in India through the British.
Figures such as the Calcutta philosopher Ram Mohan Roy, born in , were influenced not only by traditional knowledge of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian texts, but also by the growing familiarity with English writings. After Roy, in Bengal itself there were also Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Madhusudan Dutta and several generations of Tagores and their followers who were re-examining the India they had inherited in the light of what they saw happening in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Their main — often their only — source of information were the books usually in English circulating in India, thanks to British rule.
That intellectual influence, covering a wide range of European cultures, survives strongly today, even as the military, political and economic power of the British has declined dramatically. I was persuaded that Marx was basically right in his diagnosis of the need for some radical change in India, as its old order was crumbling as a result of not having been a part of the intellectual and economic globalisation that the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution had initiated across the world along with, alas, colonialism.
What India needed at the time was more constructive globalisation, but that is not the same thing as imperialism. The distinction is important. Traders, settlers and scholars moved between India and further east — China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere — for a great many centuries, beginning more than 2, years ago. The far-reaching influence of this movement — especially on language, literature and architecture — can be seen plentifully even today.
Jewish immigration into India began right after the fall of Jerusalem in the first century and continued for many hundreds of years. Baghdadi Jews, such as the highly successful Sassoons, came in large numbers even as late as the 18th century. Christians started coming at least from the fourth century, and possibly much earlier. There are colourful legends about this, including one that tells us that the first person St Thomas the Apostle met after coming to India in the first century was a Jewish girl playing the flute on the Malabar coast.
We loved that evocative — and undoubtedly apocryphal — anecdote in our classroom discussions, because it illustrated the multicultural roots of Indian traditions. The Parsis started arriving from the early eighth century — as soon as persecution began in their Iranian homeland.
Later in that century, the Armenians began to leave their footprints from Kerala to Bengal. Muslim Arab traders had a substantial presence on the west coast of India from around that time — well before the arrival of Muslim conquerors many centuries later, through the arid terrain in the north-west of the subcontinent.
At the time of the Battle of Plassey, there were already businessmen, traders and other professionals from a number of different European nations well settled near the mouth of the Ganges. Being subjected to imperial rule is thus not the only way of making connections with, or learning things from, foreign countries. They sent people for training in the US and Europe, and made institutional changes that were clearly inspired by western experience.
They did not wait to be coercively globalised via imperialism. O ne of the achievements to which British imperial theorists tended to give a good deal of emphasis was the role of the British in producing a united India.
In this analysis, India was a collection of fragmented kingdoms until British rule made a country out of these diverse regimes. It was argued that India was previously not one country at all, but a thoroughly divided land mass. It was the British empire, so the claim goes, that welded India into a nation.
Such views, often tied to nostalgia for old imperial glory, can help shape the foreign and domestic policies of Western countries. Gilley has helped to justify these views by getting his opinions published in a peer review journal.
In his article, Gilley attempts to provide evidence which proves colonialism was objectively beneficial to the colonized. In fact, the opposite is true. In the overwhelming majority of cases, empirical research clearly provides the facts to prove colonialism inflicted grave political, psychological and economic harm on the colonized.
It takes a highly selective misreading of the evidence to claim that colonialism was anything other than a humanitarian disaster for most of the colonized. With a population of over 1. While many attribute this to British colonial rule, a look at the facts says otherwise. From to , the entire period of British rule, there was no increase in per capita income within the Indian subcontinent.
This is a striking fact, given that, historically speaking, the Indian subcontinent was traditionally one of the wealthiest parts of the world. As proven by the macroeconomic studies of experts such as KN Chaudhuri , India and China were central to an expansive world economy long before the first European traders managed to circumnavigate the African cape.
And to transport food out of productive regions for export, even in times of famine. This explains the fact that during the devastating famines of and , in which 12 to 30 million Indians starved to death, mortality rates were highest in areas serviced by British rail lines.
Gilley argues current poverty and instability within the Democratic Republic of the Congo proves the Congolese were better off under Belgian rule. The evidence says otherwise. Would a narrative saying Britishers ruled India for 90 years have the same impact in coalescing Indians with their primary loyalties to local communities or kingdoms into modern nationalistic Indian?
The only power that could contradict the narrative — the British — would never do it for the opposite reason — pride.
Rulers of India for years? Sure, we will take that on our collective resumes. In the same vein, there is a new narrative of years of slavery that has been mentioned by the PM himself on multiple occassions. Now that we understand the underlying mechanism, this is similar to building a sense of shame that can create Hindu nationalism.
Kashmiri separatists try the same with a narrative of foreign rule since when Akbar invaded Kashmir to instill the feelings of Kashmiri nationalism.
Given that most of these narratives need suspension of reason for example, one needs to forget the mighty Maratha Empire that lasted nearly years in the narrative it is puzzling why they last. The only reason I can think of is that the political objective powering the narrative is strong while there is none or a weak one that wants to counter it. People are mostly lazy thinkers as Kahneman shows and will accept narratives that are hurled at them repeatedly with force.
I wish a sense of collectively, imagined future we can be proud of could act as a stronger basis of nationalism than an imagined history that we are ashamed of. History should be a matter of discovery where facts build stories and we are happy to adjust our stories as new facts emerge.
The shared ordeal of the Independence movement and Indian constitution give us enough basis for a modern nationalism.
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