 First edition | |
| Author | Jon E. Wilson |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | British Raj |
| Published | London |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
Publication date | 2016 |
| Pages | 576 |
| ISBN | 978-1-4711-0126-7 |
| 954.03 | |
India Conquered: Britain's Raj and the Chaos of Empire is a 2016 book by British historian Jon E. Wilson, Professor of Modern History at King's College, London. [1]
India Conquered is a comprehensive history of British colonial rule in India. The book aims to lay bare that "beneath the veneer of pomp and splendour, British rule in India was anxious, fragile and fostered chaos." It demonstrates that while British colonial rulers projected themselves as heroes and nation-builders, the reality for those under occupation was "a precarious regime that provided Indian society with no leadership, and which oscillated between paranoid paralysis and occasional moments of extreme violence." [2]
India Conquered is critical of the idea that British rule was a coherent and powerful force of control in India, noting the chaotic violence of authorities and the lack of development in India during the Raj. [3]
The British innovations brought to India, civil services, education, and railways had beneficial side effects according to Wilson, but were not designed for development of India, but rather to maintain political power. [3] The book explores infrastructure programmes built by British authorities, such as the railways, and contends they were constructed late by global standards and in the face of "colonial indifference" - with an insistence that construction follow British military priorities rather than local economic priorities. [2]
Literacy rates in India rose from an estimated 3.2% in 1872, to 16.1% in 1941. [4] By the time the 155,000 British citizens living in the Raj [5] left India in 1947, only 12% [2] of the 390 million people living in India was literate.
Wilson challenges the assumption, made by many on the left, that British rule in India was an efficient structure of profit-making, arguing instead that the Raj's power was piecemeal and unsystematic. [6] [7]
In The Financial Express (India) India Conquered is described as an "extensively researched" work which "proves how the British rule was not beneficial for India and how the British never assimilated themselves with the society, systems and culture of this country," but that the book "lacks proper analysis of the period prior to the British". [8]
India Conquered was praised by the British Financial Times as a "virtuoso takedown of cherished shibboleths of Raj mythology." The reviewer wrote that the book exposed "an arrogant, racist and disdainful attitude towards Indians, and also a belief that British power in India had to be absolute." [9]
In the British Literary Review, David Gilmour notes that "Wilson damages his argument by his insistence on generalisation: the British thought this or felt that...far too many Britons became linguists, historians and other scholars of India to justify the description ‘rarely interested’....There is predictably little room in this narrative for the concept of altruism." Gilmour finds that nuance distracts from Wilson's overall thesis that "‘They were interested merely in defending themselves and maintaining the trappings of authority.’" [10]
Divide and rule policy, or divide and conquer, in politics and sociology is gaining and maintaining power divisively. Historically and presently this strategy was and is used in many different ways by empires seeking to expand their territories. However, it has been hard to distinguish between the exploitation of pre-existing divisions by opponents, and the deliberate creation or strengthening of these divisions implied by "divide and rule".
Meena is a tribe from western India which is sometimes considered a sub-group of the Bhil community. It used to be claimed they speak Mina language, a spurious language. Its name is also transliterated as Meenanda or Mina. They got the status of Scheduled Tribe by the Government of India in 1954.
A princely state was a nominally sovereign entity of the British Indian Empire that was not directly governed by the British, but rather by an Indian ruler under a form of indirect rule, subject to a subsidiary alliance and the suzerainty or paramountcy of the British crown.
Colonial India was the part of the Indian subcontinent that was occupied by European colonial powers during the Age of Discovery. European power was exerted both by conquest and trade, especially in spices. The search for the wealth and prosperity of India led to the colonisation of the Americas after Christopher Columbus went to the Americas in 1492. Only a few years later, near the end of the 15th century, Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama became the first European to re-establish direct trade links with India by being the first to arrive by circumnavigating Africa. Having arrived in Calicut, which by then was one of the major trading ports of the eastern world, he obtained permission to trade in the city from the Saamoothiri Rajah. The next to arrive were the Dutch, with their main base in Ceylon. Their expansion into India was halted after their defeat in the Battle of Colachel to the Kingdom of Travancore, during the Travancore–Dutch War.
William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple is a Delhi-based Scottish historian and art historian, as well as a curator, photographer, broadcaster and critic. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the world's largest writers festival, the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.
The Pindaris were irregular military plunderers and foragers in 17th- through early 19th-century Indian subcontinent who accompanied initially the Mughal army, later the Maratha army, and finally on their own before being eliminated in the 1817–19 Pindari War. They were unpaid and their compensation was entirely the loot they plundered during wars and raids. They were mostly horsemen armed with spears and swords who would create chaos and deliver intelligence about the enemy positions to benefit the army they accompanied. The majority of their leaders were Muslims, but also had people of all classes and religions.
Indirect rule was a system of governance used by the British and others to control parts of their colonial empires, particularly in Africa and Asia, which was done through pre-existing indigenous power structures. Indirect rule was used by various colonial rulers: the French in Algeria and Tunisia, the Dutch in the East Indies, the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique and the Belgians in Rwanda and Burundi. These dependencies were often called "protectorates" or "trucial states". By this system, the day-to-day government and administration of areas both small and large were left in the hands of traditional rulers, who gained prestige and the stability and protection afforded by the Pax Britannica, at the cost of losing control of their external affairs, and often of taxation, communications, and other matters, usually with a small number of European "advisors" effectively overseeing the government of large numbers of people spread over extensive areas.
The Indian Civil Service (ICS), officially known as the Imperial Civil Service, was the higher civil service of the British Empire in India during British rule in the period between 1858 and 1947.
The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance on the Indian subcontinent. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one form or another, they existed between 1612 and 1947, conventionally divided into three historical periods:
The British Raj was the rule of the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent; it is also called Crown rule in India, or Direct rule in India, and lasted from 1858 to 1947. The region under British control was commonly called India in contemporaneous usage and included areas directly administered by the United Kingdom, which were collectively called British India, and areas ruled by indigenous rulers, but under British paramountcy, called the princely states. The region was sometimes called the Indian Empire, though not officially.
European colonialism and colonization was the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over other societies and territories, founding a colony, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically. For example, colonial policies, such as the type of rule implemented, the nature of investments, and identity of the colonizers, are cited as impacting postcolonial states. Examination of the state-building process, economic development, and cultural norms and mores shows the direct and indirect consequences of colonialism on the postcolonial states.
The historical phenomenon of colonization is one that stretches around the globe and across time. Ancient and medieval colonialism was practiced by the Phoenicians, Greeks, Turks, and Arabs.
The role and scale of British imperial policy during the British Raj on India's relative decline in global GDP remains a topic of debate among economists, historians, and politicians. Some commentators argue the effect of British rule was negative, and that Britain engaged in a policy of deindustrialisation in India for the benefit of British exporters which left Indians relatively poorer than before British rule. Others argue that Britain's impact on India was either broadly neutral or positive, and that India's declining share of global GDP was due to other factors, such as new mass production technologies or internal ethnic conflict.
The historiography of the British Empire refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of the British Empire. Historians and their ideas are the main focus here; specific lands and historical dates and episodes are covered in the article on the British Empire. Scholars have long studied the Empire, looking at the causes for its formation, its relations to the French and other empires, and the kinds of people who became imperialists or anti-imperialists, together with their mindsets. The history of the breakdown of the Empire has attracted scholars of the histories of the United States, the British Raj, and the African colonies. John Darwin (2013) identifies four imperial goals: colonising, civilising, converting, and commerce.
Eric Thomas Stokes (1924–1981) was a historian of South Asia, especially early-modern and colonial India, and of the British Empire. Stokes was the second holder of Smuts Professorship of the History of the British Commonwealth at the University of Cambridge.
The Early Nationalists, also known as the Moderates, were a group of political leaders in India active between 1885 and 1907. Their emergence marked the beginning of the organised national movement in India. Some of the important moderate leaders were Pherozeshah Mehta and Dadabhai Naoroji. With members of the group drawn from educated middle-class professionals including lawyers, teachers and government officials, many of them were educated in England.
Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, first published in India as An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, is a work of non-fiction by Shashi Tharoor, an Indian politician and diplomat, on the effects of British colonial rule on India. The book has received mixed reviews. In 2017, Tharoor won the 2017 Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award and the 2019 Sahitya Akademi Award for this work.
In political science, direct rule is when an imperial or central power takes direct control over the legislature, executive and civil administration of an otherwise largely self-governing territory.
Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches. Historiography is defined as "the study of the way history has been and is written – the history of historical writing", which means that, "When you study 'historiography' you do not study the events of the past directly, but the changing interpretations of those events in the works of individual historians."
The British in India: A Social History of the Raj is a nonfiction book by David Gilmour, a British historian.