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As a rule I find that people who take the common, simplistic, tweet-length view of British rule (i.e. that it became rich by stealing from India, that it was the deliberate invoker of India's famines, that it was racist even by its times standards, etc), assume that anyone who disagrees isn't aware of basic history. I've also noticed that there's always an (annoying) triumphal 'gotcha' when they link to some short-form essay mentioning basic facts, denied by nobody, of the famines and loss of relative share of GDP suffered by India etc. Again, _everyone knows this_. It comes across as naive and arrogant to assume otherwise. The effect British rule had in India (and everywhere) was extremely nuanced, and there is a huge amount of interesting history to be debated. After all, we're talking about a subcontinent over a 350 year time period. The British, for instance, banned the practices of Sati (burning widows alive) and of infanticide, and explicitly allowed Indians to compete on equal terms with the British in examinations to enter the Indian Civil Service. There's very little consensus amongst historians whether or not they were responsible for the famines India suffered at the time, or if they even made any net money from India whatsoever, given their constant fear of raising taxes. I'm not necessarily trying to take a position either way, by the way, just begging people who are nodding along to some of these bumper-sticker anti-colonialism comments to read more deeply into what is an unimaginably huge subject. |
As to the famines: cyclical famines were common in India: https://www.orissapost.com/this-is-why-indian-kings-used-to-.... The British didn’t cause famine in India, though it’s fair to say they mismanaged the response.