Sir

I missed this gem of a thread entirely!

You must know that Moguls weren’t the only rulers in India in the 17th century. And it must be said that yes, a lot of initial advances in medicine, called allopathic medicine, had its roots in the universities and hospitals of Scotland, which were transferred contemporaneously to many different parts of the world, of which India is a part. Just like the Indians did at the time, the Germans, the Russians, the French all acquired new medical knowledge being developed in Britain at the time. Britain did not have dominion over those countries, so in those cases, it doesn’t sound so condescending. When you juxtapose all of Britain’s regular contributions in economics, trade and science with the fact of British rule in India, every little thing becomes an exercise in condescension. We gave you the army; we gave you the navy; we gave you the unis; we gave you tea plantations - all sounds like a gift of the British, a mana from heaven for an Indian people who were waiting for whitey. To retort, Indians come up with zero, surgery, notional numbers, early medicine, wurtz steel not to mention yoga and such. It all just gets tiresome and more entertaining as a bar game than a serious discussion. To suggest trade in goods and ideas was somehow an invention of the Renaissance is simply absurd. The problem I suppose is viewing Indian history as somehow removed from other contemporaneous events. There is also the Muslim-centricity of Indian history, no doubt influenced by the then contemporaneous political supremacy of the Muslims in northern India, which leaves out so much of the rest of India. This is what’s taught in schools and adults don’t bother with reviewing things in context.

May I suggest the motivations and the reactions. India is not, and was not, a unique country then, neither is it now. When you frame the debate as one of Britain in India, by definition you push Indians on to the defensive. India was one of the territories Britain had dominion over. What applied to Indians under British rule also applied to, say, the Malays, the Kenyans, the Cantonese, the Cypriots, the Maltese amongst others.

The British Empire, indeed all modern European empires, were all economic empires, motivated primarily by the blockage of the routes to the East by the Ottomans in 1453. I am no authority, but it just seems this is the case. This was what motivated the search for an alternate route to the East (India) by many European kingdoms of the time. It was this that motivated Columbus’s voyage to India. He ended up with something much bigger. For all the noise Britain makes, she forgets that for the first two centuries after 1492, Spain and Portugal, tiny states today, essentially carved the world up between themselves. Not that many bothered with this, but Spain was the original empire over which the sun never set. The Manila Galleons plied possibly the richest trade routes of all time.

The British in India started as small-time traders in 1600, and the Mughals were not even the largest state in India at the time, though they held Bengal. It just seems to me, upon review, that the biggest powers in the world at the time were the Silk Road Empires - mostly Muslim, mostly Turkic. From about 1200 through to 1600, the Turks, through their control of the land-based Silk Road, controlled much of the Asian interior funded by their monopoly over the Silk Road. The day Columbus landed on America, the long gong of the death of the Islamic land empires, nay, all land empires, had struck. The next 400 years were essentially a long wind down of the Muslim empires of the Asian heartland and its European fringes and the rise and rise of the maritime powers. Britain got much of the Indian Ocean, Russia essentially got Iran and Turkey. Being imprisoned by land explains why Russia, the largest empire in history in 1900 (Britain had yet to cover much of Africa), was useless in terms of power projection. This is influenced in my view by the simple fact that transferring goods by sea is cheaper than mass transport by land by an order of magnitude.

The tussle between the European imperial powers was essentially maritime in nature, and it is British supremacy at sea that gave her the edge over others. With the fall of the only power capable of challenging this at the time - the French under Napoleon - Britain essentially found herself as the last man standing in the oceans. The early 1800s were essentially carte blanche for Britain, with Britain helping herself to all the choice locations across the world. Much of the second empire of the time - the French - consisted of the Sahara - they can have it. The British Empire is not the story of British strength so much as it is that of the weakness of others.

None of the Muslim empires really cared much for the oceans; the Ottomans were bullies of the Mediterranean but with alternate routes to Asia they were stuck. Though they were prolific traders, the Muslim empires as a whole were technologically unproductive, because of which they simply did not grow as societies the way Europeans did during their revival. It is kind of what happens when people drop everything and leave it all to god as opposed to finding solutions themselves to improve human life through research and questioning.

While the conquest of India was praiseworthy from a British military point of view, if you put things in the light of all above, the British conquests seems rather tame. It was only a matter of time, given Britain’s naval superiority, for much of the world that were land-based and not interested in the sea, to fall or be strangled to submission. Land armies and land empires simply could not compete with the sheer efficiencies of oceanic power projection.

Britain did not bother with countries that were even half her equal in naval strength, and she stayed away from Europe. This applied to most other European powers as well. It is also in this context that the outright victory in open naval combat by Travancore inflicted on the Dutch, then the world’s leading maritime power, becomes such an astonishing feat.

Much of India was ravaged in the Middle Ages by a state system that was based on an essentially inferior ie less productive civilisation than what India had in the centuries prior, due to reasons mentioned above. We can go on and on about the details, but with the arrival of the trade-based European empires, in India especially, the people got a breather; it was the beginning of a long process of uncorking. Nationalists praise relics of the time such as Taj Mahal etc forgetting that these were tombs with rotting corpses at its very heart. It is an apt illustration of India at the time; it was better to be dead than alive. All talk of “the British looted India” or “the British persecuted Indians” omits suspiciously any mention of the looting and persecution that was taking place under the auspices of the resident alien rulers of the time, as well as the painstaking efforts taken by the British and Germans in documenting and cataloguing Indian history via bodies such as the ASI.

I find the European colonial enterprise, warts and all, fascinating. More than anything, it is the story of people; individuals who were enterprising. Their biases influenced their actions perhaps, but is that not true anytime?

It did not need military and political dominion over much of the world for the ideas of Europe to spread far and wide, but we do not know how much longer it would have taken had things not happened the way they did. As much as Europe innovated technologically, especially during the Enlightenment, there seemed to be a flow of ideas westwards from the East, influencing latter notions of liberty and citizenship. It may not be without reason that European reviewers of the time itself compared a lot of the work coming out of the likes of Spinoza to be parallel to, if not outright influenced by, Indian philosophical ideas contained in the Upanishads; heretical to many contemporary Europeans. Several of the leading thinkers of the time in Europe were committed Indologists, imbibing in their work, and even in their lives, the values and lessons espoused in Eastern (mostly Indian) philosophical texts. I wonder, would it then be so wrong to say that Indians, long oppressed and enfeebled
at the time of European entry, got the technologically superior Europeans to do their liberating for them? Isn’t the world today, technologically sound, moving inexorably towards an ideologically Indian future, molded not by Indian race, rather by Indian ideas, temporarily being frustrated? In this light, the British seem to have been unwitting liberators of the Indians.

European imperialism often is viewed in light of religion by much of those at the receiving end - British and other Europeans are often referred to as Christian empires especially by the Mullahs, and not least by those combatting missionaries these days - but trade-motivated empires such as the British and the Dutch seemed nonchalant as far as religious zeal was concerned. Same could not be said of the Spanish, Portuguese and French. Definitely not the Muslim empires. With the result that successor states of the British, Japanese and Dutch empires are far more self-assured, less molested and more liberal than those of the others.

I am Indian, and stories of the humiliation of my forebears are, like for most other people, anathema. May it be suggested that to view the impact of colonialism in a more neutral light, it would be better to review other instances of colonialism, such as of the Germans in East Africa or the Japanese in Formosa or Korea, both of which had, on the whole, positive economic impacts on those territories. India may have been the Jewel in the Crown as far as British propaganda is concerned, but it will help to know perhaps that she was just another colony as far as the colonists were concerned. It is futile, in my view, given the technological disparities between the conquered and the conqueror, to compare Indian armies of the time with those of the Europeans, which actually brings to relief the work of the Travancore Navy. Britain had a mostly unbeaten run in all Asia, not just India, until the Japanese, an industrialized society with similar, though slightly less, levels of industrial sophistication, handed them what can only be called a summary humiliation, saved only by American handouts.

As much as it humiliates Indians when told of Britain’s imperial largesse to India, it humiliates the British to know that their vaunted navy and army folded to the Japanese in two weeks in Singapore, not to mention that little road they helped the Japs create in Burma - the Japs were grateful for that. And as colonists, the Japanese were rather successful too, just like the British claim, in Korea and Taiwan, both of whom are astounding economic successes today and were rather decent economies before the war. Let’s all eat some humble porridge.