British Raj

From Company to Crown

The rebellion of 1857 — sepoy mutiny, peasant revolt, and the last stand of the displaced ruling houses, according to which part of it is examined — was suppressed over eighteen months with great violence on both sides. Its consequence was the transfer of Indian government from the East India Company to the Crown under the Government of India Act of 1858, the exile of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar to Rangoon, and the end of any pretence that the Company was a trading body.

The structure that followed had two parts: British India, administered directly through provinces, and some five hundred and sixty-five princely states, which retained internal government under British paramountcy in exchange for surrendering defence and foreign relations. Roughly two-fifths of the territory and a quarter of the population were in the states.

What the Raj built and what it cost

The period saw the construction of one of the world's largest railway networks, a telegraph system, irrigation works in the Punjab and the deltas, a codified legal system, universities at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, and a professional civil service. It also saw the deindustrialisation of Indian textile manufacture in the face of Lancashire imports, land revenue settlements that transferred risk to cultivators, and a pattern of famine — 1876–78, 1896–97, 1899–1900, and Bengal in 1943 — in which tens of millions died while grain was exported and relief was rationed against the fear of encouraging dependence.

The economic balance of the period is the subject of a long and unfinished argument. The nineteenth-century nationalist economists Dadabhai Naoroji and R. C. Dutt formulated the drain theory — that a systematic net transfer of resources to Britain, through home charges, pensions and unrequited exports, accounted for Indian poverty. The estimates and the counterarguments have been contested ever since, and any confident single figure should be treated with suspicion. What is not seriously disputed is that India's share of world manufacturing output fell steeply across the period, and that per capita income growth was close to nil.

The Raj also codified categories that outlasted it — caste as an enumerated and administratively fixed identity through the census, the classification of martial races for recruitment, and separate electorates by religion from 1909, whose consequences were considerable.

The end

Organised nationalism dates from the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and became a mass movement under Gandhi after 1919 — non-cooperation, the salt march, civil disobedience, Quit India. The Muslim League's demand for Pakistan from 1940, the Second World War's exhaustion of British capacity, the Bengal famine of 1943, the Indian National Army trials and the naval mutiny of 1946 together made continued rule impossible.

Partition and independence came on 14 and 15 August 1947. The division of Punjab and Bengal along lines drawn in five weeks by a commission under Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to India, was followed by the largest forced migration in recorded history — some fifteen million people displaced — and by killings estimated between several hundred thousand and two million.

The princely states were required to accede to one dominion or the other. Most did so before independence; Junagadh, Hyderabad and Jammu and Kashmir did not, and the last of these has been disputed since.