It has been often argued from the British point of view that British rule in India actually helped India, I would like to discuss the views from India’s perspective and if the atrocities of British rules translates into Britain paying reparations to India. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its thefts in India, Britain’s industrialization was actually based upon the deindustrialization of India. By the dawn of the 19th Centaury it is a noted fact that India was Britain’s biggest cash cow, the world biggest purchaser of British merchandise and the greatest wellspring of generously compensated jobs for British Civil Servants.
This has often been challenged by the British and the most noted contributions in their books are the Indian …show more content…
This is a fine example of how everything that was constructed during the British rule was solely to benefit England. India was treated as a cash cow from where raw materials were extracted as it had it in plenty and finished goods were sold as it had a huge population which translated into a huge market. The corruption, official kickbacks and poor allocation of resources resulted in losses of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Indian taxpayers, including those in opportunity costs. This resulted in making the railway debt rise to the extent that it contributed 50% of the total Indian National Debt from 1903 to 1945. The most unethical part is that the monopolies like Bombay Baroda that benefited in millions of pounds constructing the railways were operating in India but were registered in London and never reinvested the money back into the …show more content…
When the British left India in 1947, India inherited a frail railway system. Today after several additions to the railways and improvements and years of hard work the Indian Railways is one of the worlds largest railway networks which has had a revenue of $24 Billion in 2014-2015. Railways is one such example of the cultural collision between India and the United Kingdom, which forms the bigger collision regarding reparations. The British Empire used India to its advantage and did what any other colonial force would have done, but the implications of the colonial rule are also the responsibility of the colonizer to an extent. It is often argued that there is no possible way to calculate the reparations, but the bigger question is if India is owed reparations or not, the simple acceptance of the mistakes, corruption, atrocities committed by the British Empire will itself make millions of Indians go to sleep at night in peace as for years they have remembered the colonial days and feel like no one in the world stage believes the stories that they lived. The fact is that many of todays problems in countries like India were the direct result of the colonial experience, which proves that
This has often been challenged by the British and the most noted contributions in their books are the Indian …show more content…
This is a fine example of how everything that was constructed during the British rule was solely to benefit England. India was treated as a cash cow from where raw materials were extracted as it had it in plenty and finished goods were sold as it had a huge population which translated into a huge market. The corruption, official kickbacks and poor allocation of resources resulted in losses of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Indian taxpayers, including those in opportunity costs. This resulted in making the railway debt rise to the extent that it contributed 50% of the total Indian National Debt from 1903 to 1945. The most unethical part is that the monopolies like Bombay Baroda that benefited in millions of pounds constructing the railways were operating in India but were registered in London and never reinvested the money back into the …show more content…
When the British left India in 1947, India inherited a frail railway system. Today after several additions to the railways and improvements and years of hard work the Indian Railways is one of the worlds largest railway networks which has had a revenue of $24 Billion in 2014-2015. Railways is one such example of the cultural collision between India and the United Kingdom, which forms the bigger collision regarding reparations. The British Empire used India to its advantage and did what any other colonial force would have done, but the implications of the colonial rule are also the responsibility of the colonizer to an extent. It is often argued that there is no possible way to calculate the reparations, but the bigger question is if India is owed reparations or not, the simple acceptance of the mistakes, corruption, atrocities committed by the British Empire will itself make millions of Indians go to sleep at night in peace as for years they have remembered the colonial days and feel like no one in the world stage believes the stories that they lived. The fact is that many of todays problems in countries like India were the direct result of the colonial experience, which proves that