 At the start of the 20th century the map of the world looked like this. These colors are Europe's colonial empires. France had possessions across Africa and Indochina, Italy was in East Africa and Libya and the Dutch were in what is today Indonesia. By far the biggest empire however belonged to Britain and the jewel in its crown was the Indian subcontinent. People talk a lot about Britain's colonial legacy and whether it was really so bad. Given the importance of British India for the empire it's the best place to start if you want an answer to that. It's important to say that the Indian subcontinent at that time the Mughal empire wasn't conquered by Britain but rather a British corporation. Its name was the East India Company. The Mughal empire of the 18th century was politically volatile but also immensely wealthy. According to economic historian Angus Madison its share of the world economy in 1700 was 23% pretty much the same as the whole of Europe combined for the United States today. Although the East India Company started life in the early 1600s it was only a century later after the sack of Delhi by the Persian king Mada Shah that the Mughal empire effectively collapsed. That created the political vacuum with warring principalities and factions becoming increasingly distrustful of one another. For the East India Company this presented a major opportunity and in 1757 Robert Clive who came to be known as Clive of India won the battle of Placid. Eight years later in 1765 Shah Alam issued an edict that revenue officials be replaced by those of the company. A private corporation with its own army now controlled one of the largest and wealthiest states on earth. Over the following century the area they controlled significantly expanded. That was until the Indian mutiny of 1857 at which point the British government administered the country instead. Things would remain that way until India gained independence in 1947. So on balance over those two centuries did Britain make any positive contribution to India by making it a part of the British empire. First let's talk about the economy. When Clive triumphed at the battle of Placid the Mughal empire comprised around 23% of the world economy. By 1947 as the British withdrew that figure had fallen to 4%. The reason why was that in the intervening 200 years the industrialization of Britain had come to depend on the de-industrialization of South Asia. Take textile manufacturers one example. In the early 18th century India enjoyed a 25% share of the global trading textiles. But by 1834 Lord Bentonick declared that the bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India. Meanwhile exports of British textiles to India soared with a billion yards entering the latter each year after 1870. Things were so bad that by 1896 India produced only 8% of the cloth consumed domestically meaning it had gone from exporting powerhouse to serving a tiny portion of domestic demand. It wasn't an accident that Britain became the workshop of the world starting with cotton manufacturers something which would have been impossible without force. Indeed according to an economist Britain took around 45 trillion dollars out of India between 1765 and 1938. That's 14.5 times the size of the British economy today. This primarily happened to a trade. Prior to the 18th century Britain bought things from Indian producers and would pay for them with precious metals generally silver but this changed after 1765 when the East India Company established a monopoly over Indian trade. They then began collecting taxes in India using a portion of those revenues typically a third to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words instead of paying for Indian goods British traders acquired them for free. Some of these essentially stolen goods were consumed in Britain while the rest were exported elsewhere. This allowed Britain to finance the flow of imports from Europe including materials like iron tar and timber which were critical for you guessed it Britain's industrial revolution. But India's exploitation wasn't merely limited to economics and resources. By the late 19th century two-thirds of the British Empire's standing army was paid for by Indian taxes and by 1922 around two-thirds of the Indian government's revenues paid for British Indian troops abroad. Indians weren't just paying for their own subjugation but that of others too. But India also paid in blood with over one million Indian troops serving during the First World War suffering an estimated 74,000 casualties a statistic which is generally neglected. Then there was the Second World War which Britain joined in order to defend the sovereignty of Poland and it did so while maintaining an empire. What is more it was India that contributed the largest number of soldiers to British Imperial forces raising the largest volunteer force in history around 2.5 million men by 1945. Meanwhile the country's elected political leadership, the Congress Party, was in prison. 87,000 soldiers from the Indian Empire lost their lives fighting for democracy and yet the very politicians they elected were in prison. Some British officers were honest about the scale of British India's contribution with Field Marshal Sir Claude Orkinlech commander-in-chief of the Indian Army admitting that the British couldn't have come through both World War One and Two if they hadn't had the Indian Army. Indeed in its darkest hour Britain relied on India to get through something forgotten today when people say it stood alone. Finally there's famine with around 30 million people dying as a result of starvation under British rule. You could put that down to natural disaster but the grim truth is that the overwhelming majority of those deaths were the result of political choices made by the British. Indeed when it came to famine just as in Ireland in the 1840s and 50s British policy was in action. Firstly because intervention was viewed as undermining free trade. Secondly because of concerns about overpopulation and finally well they just didn't want to spend money. The point of empire was that it was a cash cow. This wasn't a secret. Indeed when Sir Richard Temple imported rice during the Orissa famine of 1866 the Economist magazine, yes that one, attacked him for allowing Indians to think it is the duty of the government to keep them alive. That was the position of the British government too. In British India people were allowed to starve to death as a point of ideology and all in the name of the free market. That's no difference the forced collectivisations that killed millions during the 20th century. Unsurprisingly then the last famine on the Indian subcontinent was in 1943, shortly before the British departed. That was the Bengal famine when Winston Churchill deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to British soldiers and to top up European stockpiles. According to Churchill the starvation of any way underfed Bengalis was less serious and as death began to pile up he planned it on the Indians themselves for breeding like rabbits. When the East India Company was established the Mughal Empire presided over the world's largest economy with one of its most sophisticated cultures. At that point India had literacy rates and a life expectancy on a par with Europe. When Britain departed the subcontinent in 1947 by contrast it left the society with 16% literacy, a life expectancy of 31 and 90% of people living below the poverty line. Compare that to Japan which achieved 90% literacy after the major restoration and rapid development during the late 19th century. The key difference of course is that Japan was never colonised. Yet despite all of this a poll by YouGovern 2020 found that only 17% of Brits think the country's Britain colonised were worse off as a result, with almost twice as many thinking they benefited. It's one thing to say Britain's empire is in the past but it's quite another to insist that empires in poverty and starvation on hundreds of millions of people was actually good for them. It brought order, security, education and democracy to much of the world. When asked whether the empire was something to be proud or ashamed of, 32% claimed to feel proud of the empire while 19% were ashamed. Personally speaking I don't feel ashamed for things I haven't done but prior in what exactly? Theft? Starvation? Mass murder? The only way to make sense of such findings is to accept that even today people don't know the truth about the British empire and how gruesome it really was. Given recent calls from politicians that we should learn about our history rather than seek to erase it, all I can say is I couldn't agree more. Let's start by teaching the truth about the British empire and how it took one of the world's wealthiest countries and turned it into one of the poorest. If you enjoyed this video there are two things you can do which won't cost you a thing. 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