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> Biggar also contends that British rule in India, initially under the auspices of the East India Company (EIC) from the 1750s and direct colonial rule after 1857, was far from the rapacious affair that Whigs at the time (Burke springs to mind) or later historians, like Theodore Dalrymple assert. That is a tall claim, if there ever was one. > EIC officials like Ernest ‘Oriental’ Jones and Warren Hastings showed a profound interest in Hindu culture and went to great lengths to accommodate Indian custom to utilitarian understandings of law and property. Biggar suggests that, Edward Said, the author of the 1978 book Orientalism which spawned post-colonial discourse theory and decolonise campaigns in education, distorted the character of European and British interest in both India and China. Warren Hastings presided over the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 and reported back to the EIC about the wipeout of 10 million humans in Bengal. Damodaran, Vinita (2014), "The East India Company, Famine and Ecological Conditions in Eighteenth-Century Bengal", in V. Damodaran; A. Winterbottom; A. Lester (eds.), The East India Company and the Natural World, Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 80–101, 89, ISBN 978-1-137-42727-4, writes: > Before the end of May 1770, one third of the population was calculated to have disappeared, in June the deaths were returned as six out of sixteen of the whole population, and it was estimated that 'one half of the cultivators and payers of revenue will perish with hunger'. During the rains (July–October) the depopulation became so evident that the government wrote to the court of directors in alarm about the number of 'industrious peasants and manufacturers destroyed by the famine'. It was not till cultivation commenced for the following year 1771 that the practical consequences began to be felt. It was then discovered that the remnant of the population would not suffice to till the land. The areas affected by the famine continued to fall and were put out of tillage. Warren Hastings' account, written in 1772, also stated the loss as one third of the inhabitants and this figure has often been cited by subsequent historians. The failure of a single crop, following a year of scarcity, had wiped out an estimated 10 million human beings according to some accounts. The monsoon was on time in the next few years but the economy of Bengal had been drastically transformed, as the records of the next thirty years attest." So, yeah. The empire was evil. |