Under the latter, publishers were required to provide a hefty security deposit, which they would forfeit if the publication carried inflammatory or abusive articles. The racism of the British-owned press was not subject to the same restrictions. The justice system in India was even more discriminatory. For instance, an Englishman who shot dead his Indian servant got six months in jail and a modest fine.
But an Indian convicted of the attempted rape of an Englishwoman was sentenced to 20 years. Worse still, the legacy of the British legal system has left India with an unenviable judicial backlog. There are still cases pending that were filed during the days of the Raj. Indeed, if a pluralist democracy were a British legacy, how is it that neither Pakistan nor Bangladesh have pulled off a similar feat?
Few kings ever rule to benefit their people. And, yet, what the British did to India was decidedly worse. How can we be sure that the British were to blame for those hunger deaths? Worse still, the British notion at the time was that governmental interference to prevent a famine was a bad idea. On one route, between Kolkata to Trinidad, the proportion of deaths of indentured labourers on ships reached appalling levels: If you were to believe official figures, the British troops fired 1, bullets at innocent civilians, killing and wounding 1, Those who were killed had no idea that suddenly their gathering was suddenly deemed illegal and they received no warning to disperse.
The British built the railways primarily for themselves, using their own technology and forcing Indians to buy British equipment. Each mile of the Indian railway constructed cost nine times as much as the same in the US, and twice that in difficult and less populated Canada and Australia. The bills were footed by Indian taxpayers and British investors received a guaranteed return on their capital.
Freight charges were dirt cheap, and Indians who traveled 3rd class paid for expensive tickets. The British desire to end their dependence on Chinese tea prompted them to set up plantations in India. Following many failed attempts, they managed to find a local version that worked.
For this, the British felled vast forests, stripped the tribals who lived there of their rights, and then paid Indian labourers poorly to cultivate the cleared areas. They first engaged with India as members of the monopolistic East India Company. From the start they were anxious about challenges to their position from other European merchants and Indian rulers.
Trade always involved violence, with the company recruiting armies and building forts from the late s. A combination of paranoid concerns about defence and the opportunity for military glory then created an impulse towards conquest from the mid 18th Century onwards. In practice, from the beginning to the end of Britain's empire, the British created a series of heavily fortified outposts, doing little more than what they thought was necessary to protect their power.
Order and some level of public service was provided in imperial cities and district capitals where Britons resided, but there was no effective government machinery in much of Indian society.
By contemporary standards, the size of the state was tiny, and the capacity for political action very limited. During the 19th and early 20th Centuries, British infrastructure was usually built as a panicked response to crisis; public works were not a measured effort to improve Indian society or even help British traders profit.
Irrigation works were started in the s only after a series of economic crises made the British worry about rebellion and diminishing taxes. Railways were only backed enthusiastically after the great rebellion of proved the need to be able to transport troops quickly across India to suppress dissent.
In the middle of the 19th Century even British capitalists wanted the government in India to invest more, but British officials refused to act unless it would directly protect their power. The chaos of British rule helped turn late 19th Century India into one of the world's most famine-prone societies, as the political networks and mechanisms with which Indians supported each other in times of need were undermined by the British fear of political challenge.
Famine relief was focused on protecting centres of British authority and keeping expenditure as low as possible. The initial strategy was to build famine camps to provide the starving with work far away from existing centres of settlement, so the poor didn't cluster and protest in imperial towns.
British rule ended amid a cycle of violence sparked by the Raj's paranoid concerns about its own security. The 20th Century's two world wars turned India into a massive self-financing barracks essential to defend Britain's position throughout Asia - but it also racked up anxiety in the face of challenge.
The idea of dominating India had come to be woven into imperial families' very way of life; for some, any form of retreat involved a major existential crisis. The result was events like Gen Reginald Dyer's unplanned massacre of hundreds of people at Amritsar's Jallianwala Bagh in , which undermined the belief of many Indian nationalists that they could negotiate with the Raj. However, protests from Indian nationalists had become more common and were sometimes violent.
Indians had sent and paid for thousands of troops to fight in the Great War and they felt that this sacrifice should be recognised with more say in running the country. In there was a huge demonstration at Amritsar. The commander of the British forces in the area was General Dyer.
He ordered troops to fire on the peaceful protesters. Around were killed and about injured. His actions caused horror and outrage in India and back in Britain. General Dyer was forced to retire but was not charged with any crimes. One of the reasons for the British reaction at Amritsar was that they were nervous about the growing nationalist movement.
One of its leading figures was a remarkable man called Gandhi. He began his career protesting about the ill treatment of non-whites in South Africa.
In he returned to his home - India - to convince the British to leave. He believed in non-violent protest, and his methods were extremely effective. He led many demonstrations against British rule. For example, he led thousands of Indians in a protest against the tax on salt. This tax discriminated against Indians. The protests were broken up violently by British troops who used clubs against the peaceful protesters.
During the s and s British attitudes towards India began to shift. This was partly a result of Gandhi's protests and the work of other nationalist leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru. At the same time, India stopped being as important to Britain's economy as it had been in the past. There was also the fact that Britain gave self-rule to the Irish Free State in and this made it even harder to deny self-rule to India. Throughout the s and s Britain introduced a range of measures that gave more and more independence to India.
The number of Indians who were eligible to vote was increased.
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