Facing Historical Truths About British Colonialism

 by Juliette Franks

Why is it that I could tell you endless benefits to British rule in India. We built world-class train systems, taught them cricket, established the legal system, however, I’ve been taught next to nothing about atrocities that happened in India as a result of the ‘mighty’ British Empire.

The national curriculum for history requires pupils to understand ‘how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world’. For some reason, it seems that many schools interpret this to focus on the positive influences, and often ignore the equally important negative influences. 

In a 2014 poll, 50% of the British population said that they believed that the Empire was beneficial to colonies. Maybe you are in that 50%, and maybe you also didn’t know about the following.

In British India, more than 1.6 million workers were transported to European countries for forced labour, as a substitute for slave labour which had recently been abolished. This was through indentured servitude, which is a form of labour where people have to work without a salary until the indenture has been paid. Furthermore, from around the 1700s to when India gained independence in 1947, the East India Company (A British trading company) was exploiting India for its plentiful resources of cotton, tea, silks and porcelain. This only continued at a larger scale once British Rule actually began in 1858. The East India Company started collecting extremely high taxes in India once they obtained a monopoly over Indian trade around 1765. They then used this money to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use.

After British rule started in India, Britain controlled trading of Indian goods with other countries by only allowing them to buy these goods using a special paper currency issued only by the British Crown - Council Bills. Therefore, the Empire still got all the profit. Overall, it is estimated that the British Empire drained almost £45 trillion from India from 1765-1938. Finally, not only did they exploit India’s resources, they left the country in a terrible state after drawing physical borders across religious borders. During Partition, millions of Muslims migrated to Pakistan, whilst millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed to India. This was because of the sudden outbreak of violence following independence, where communities that had coexisted for years suddenly could no longer live in peace. Between 1-2 million people died during Partition, and one of the causes was the British Empire’s thoughtless ruling in India. 

Reading Babel by R.F. Kuang enlightened me to something I had absolutely no awareness of previously. The British Empire’s Opium Wars against China. The British Empire forcibly traded the opium that they exploited from India (Indian opium farmers were only allowed to trade their opium with the East India Company) with China at an increased price, despite the fact that it was illegal to trade or smoke opium in China. By 1840, millions of Chinese were addicted to opium, and the British were all the more richer, with estimates of 4570 chests of opium being traded from 1800-1801. This exploitative trade weakened the economy and Chinese people who became addicted to opium faced severe health consequences, and were then unable to work, further damaging the Chinese economy.

There is a misguided concept that to be proud and patriotic in the UK, we must brush over the more shameful events in our history. I think it is far more important that we acknowledge the issues related to the Empire, as well as the benefits it brought the colonies as well, in order to be both proud and educated.