Impact of British colonial rule on India

Ravikiran asks, Was the British Raj good for India?.

Was the British Raj good for India?

I don’t know the answer and you don’t, either.

Some people have argued in their comments that British united India politically. I don’t understand why that is supposed to be a good thing for Indian people. Europe is divided into small nations continously fighting against each other. Various empires came and went unleashing huge destruction in their wake. European went through Napoleanic wars, various uprisings, invasions, World I, World II, communist rule and so on. And inspite of all that on an average European nations are in much better situation compared to India in terms of economy. Most of the European nations have maintained their own language and not taken to English.

So, why do we think that integration of India and introduction of English is supposed to be good for India?

Maybe India would not have been united (politically) as much as it is today without the British Raj. Maybe the industrial revolution would have reached us later. But even if that would have been true, it does not automatically show that we would have been poorer today. Even if we had politically united slowly or started on industrial revolution late we might have progressed faster after that. That is because, without the power of British-given beaurocracy socialism could not have spread its tentacles in India. One of the reason why so many African colonies got screwed by socialism was because socialist elites were left in charge of a huge Govt. machinary after British were gone. That has caused so much poverty that the political disunity and late start at industrialization would have been much better by comparison.

See also Gaurav's post on this. Also, see interesting discussion at

Asymmetrical Information on whether colonialism caused poverty in the colonies. There in comments I mention the reason why British rule caused poverty in India.
One of commentator there had this to say:

"Like that never happened under the native rulers.

Basically, what colonialism does is replace on set of exploitive elites with another. I doubt very seriously that (a few horrific examples like the Belgian Congo aside) it has much impact on the overall wealth of the country or on the living conditions of the masses."

Here is my reply:
I totally agree that the native rules also exploited people. And not just the rulers, but in case of India, whole set of things came together to exploit ordinary masses. For example, casteism. But the reason I believe that colonial rule caused serious damage and poverty is many-fold:
1) British used advanced technology (weapons, railways and others) that increased the rate of exploitation. It is pretty simple. If you can ferry raw materials over long distance you are going to try to exploit more.
2) British did not replace the native rulers. Atleast, not until later stage of the colonial rule. They contracted with the native rulers and landlords to continue and increase the exploitation. They used the existing power structures as a means of revenue collection and consolidate their grip on power.
3) They created a centralized administrative structure which came handy for socialists to continue their grip on power. Without that I doubt if India would have went from feudalism to socialism without going through industrial capitalism. European countries also had socialism but after industrial growth had already taken place. That's why you can see that they have relatively much richer than the colonies. Basically, British exploited and expanded the feudal structures of the colonies as long as they could and later handed over to the socialists. A perfect recipe for poverty.

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[yash sinha]

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