"No great portion of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the peoples of Hindustan. They [India] were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small Island."
What was conveniently forgotten was that India's contribution to the war effort was a whopping 2 billion pounds in goods and services and was second to Britain in terms of war contribution. Indian soldiers, about three and a half million, who fought for Britain's in the Second World War.
But for Indians it meant nothing except plunder and pillage. As Mike Davis puts it:
"If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947. Indeed, in the last half of the nineteenth century, income probably declined by more than 50 percent. There was no economic development at all in the usual sense of the term"[xi]
Moreover, the forgotten holocausts of famine in British India caused the loss of lives in the range of 12 -- 29 million.
If extracting huge income and wealth from slave trade and slave labor, from plantations and plunder from India were major sources of revenue for the imperial enterprise of Britain, there was another source which was to enrich the imperial coffers of Britain even more: opium.
"The British Empire", writes Newsinger, "was the largest drug pusher the world has ever seen." He adds "By the 1830s the smuggling of opium into China was a source of huge profits and these profits played a crucial role in the financing of British rule in India and were the underpinnings of British trade and commerce throughout the East." [xii] The criminal financing of British imperial empire is adroitly avoided or played down by British historians.
Opium was produced in India and came under British control towards the end of the 18th century. In the later part of the 17th century the infamous East India Company acquired monopoly rights over the production and also managed its sales to China. The opium export to China which started as early as 1760 expanded considerably after 1820 to 2500 tons of opium in 1838. The profits obtained was crucial to the expansion of the British Empire in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
However, the export of opium caused severe addiction among the Chinese and alarmed the Chinese rulers who took harsh measures to stamp out drug abuse. One was to imprison the British merchants and holding in hostage until they surrendered the opium. The British merchants promptly sought compensation from the British government on the basis of inflated figures.
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