A History of Colonial India

1757 to 1947

Himanshu Roy, Jawaid Alam, Himanshu Roy, Jawaid Alam

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000508925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on British colonial rule in India. It draws on sociology, history, and political science to look at key events and social process, between 1757 to 1947, to provide a comprehensive understanding of the colonial history. It begins with the introductory backdrop of the British East India Company when its ship docked at Surat in 1603 and ends with the partition and independence in 1947.

A compelling read, the book explores a range of key themes which include:

– Early colonial polity, economic transformation, colonial educational policies, and other initial developments;

– The revolt of 1857 and its aftermath;

– Colonial subjectivities and ethnographic interventions, colonial capitalism and its insititutions,

– Constitutional developments in colonial India;

– Early nationalist politics, the rise of Indian National Congress, the role of Gandhi in nationalist politics, and the Quit India movement;

– Social movements and gender politics under the colonial rule;

– Partition of India and independence.

Accessibly written and exhaustive, this volume will be essential reading for students, teachers, scholars, and researchers of political science, history, sociology and literature.

1 Interpreting colonialism and nationalism

DOI: 10.4324/9781003246510-1

Niraj Kumar Jha

Theories on colonialism and imperialism

The rise of capitalism in Europe coincided with the discovery of the sea route around Africa’s southern coast and of the Americas near the end of the 15th century, leading to the shift of sea power from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and mainly, but not exclusively, the states of Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France and England starting the process of colonization by discovering, settling and annexing areas throughout the world; a process which so begun became a global order in the course of history. Geographical discoveries aided Western capitalism and made it powerful enough to get rid of feudal restrictions at home and at the same time, in turn, enabled the Europeans to annex or command more and more territories as colonies or semi-colonies abroad. As the major seafaring states of Europe fought for global expansion and capitalism was becoming more a decisive force, another autonomous though not unrelated phenomenon was germinating in Europe, which was modern nationalism. In the 18th century, nationalism emerged and spread to become the most potent force of human history. The last two centuries of global history can largely be put into perspective by viewing the composite of these two phenomena: colonialism and nationalism. They changed the course of human history and humanity itself altogether.

This chapter seeks to review the global historical phenomena of colonialism and nationalism from the standpoint of Indian historical experiences. Colonialism was the outward expansion of capitalism. Europeans ventured into India seeking control over the land, people and resources. The British among them could outrival others, conquered large swathes of land in India and gained mastery over the whole of the subcontinent, the possessions they proudly called ‘the jewel of the crown’.

Colonialism is ‘a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another’.¹ For it,

two conditions are necessary. The land held as a colony must have no real political independence from the ‘mother country’, but also the relationship must be one of forthright exploitation. The entire reason for having colonies is to increase the wealth and welfare of the colonial power, either by extracting resources, material or labour from the colony more cheaply than they could be bought on a free market, or by ensuring a market for one’s own goods at advantageous rates.²

But here it must be added that whatever good occurred to the metropolitan commoners was by default than by design. The fact is that colonies were acquired not for the good of the metropolitan nation as a whole but for the benefit of the dominant class within it. Marx writes that Holland, which first fully developed the colonial system, in 1648 stood already in the acme of its commercial greatness. He cites Glilich to underscore the issue: ‘The total capital of the Republic was probably more important than that of all the rest of Europe put together’. And he adds, ‘Glilich forgets to add that by 1648, the people of Holland were more over-worked, poorer and more brutally oppressed than those of all the rest of Europe put together’.³ Colonialism is thus the subjection of other people for unrestricted extraction of resources and exploitation of the people primarily for the gain of the dominant class of the metropolitan country.

The most crucial of the changes was the rise of a merchant class and correspondingly of mercantile capitalism. It was a new force that was restless, breaking free of feudal localism, the traditional guild system of economy and papal orthodoxy. In fact, colonialism helped the new class to overwhelm feudal domination and pave their own way.

As capitalism evolved and acquired different forms, colonialism also underwent changes corresponding to it, namely mercantile, industrial and finance capital.

The competition among these seafaring nations resulted in great advancements in navigation technologies and techniques. Better cartography and improved navigational tables, telescopes and barometers made seafaring easier and safer. This strengthened Europe’s technological superiority further vis-à-vis others. Europe’s seafaring states, located mainly on the Atlantic seaboard, Portugal, Spain, France, Britain and Holland, founded colonies in America, Africa and Asia. The merchant capitalism of Europe which drove entrepreneurs overseas made them masters of land across continents.

Britain with its great wealth and military might became the foremost imperial power, outpacing all its rivals. Its empire expanded at the rate of 100,000 square miles per year between 1815 and 1865. Around 1900 Britain was the unrivalled global power. Her empire was spread over 12 million square miles, covering a quarter of the total global population. The British maintained strategic sites and commercial hubs like Singapore, Aden, Falkland Islands, Hong Kong and Lagos. Certain lands such as South Africa, Canada and Australia they chose for their people to settle. With the rest they traded on dictated terms, levied extremely high taxes and hauled out natural resources.

Even before the predominance of the finance capital, Britain was exporting capital worth 30 million pounds a year by 1850, which increased to 75 million pounds during the period 1870–75. From 1870 to 1913 London was the foremost financial and trading hub of the world. The overseas investments of Britain had reached 4,000 million pounds by 1913. In 1914 the European states together controlled over 84.4 per cent of the world. With the end of the First World War, Britain lost its pre-eminent position to the US which grew to be the world’s largest manufacturer, foreign investor, trader and banker and the US dollar became the standard international currency. The end of the Second World War set forth the process of decolonization and at the same time emergence of multinational companies and the gamut of West dominated international funding agencies. With decolonization began the end of old imperialism but at the same time the beginning of neo-imperialism.

Imperialism

In the first decade of the 20th century many theoretical formulations emerged on the nature of colonialism, which was being termed as imperialism.

Hobson’s book Imperialism: A Study, first published in 1902, was a seminal work which pioneered the economic interpretation and critique of imperialism. The study greatly influenced the later works on imperialism including those of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. In this book Hobson propounded the view that imperial expansion is driven by a search for new markets and investment opportunities. Apparently patriotism, adventurism and philanthropy resulted in imperial expansions, but from a nationalist perspective the ventures were not rational, as the costs of wars and armaments, and in terms of social reforms set aside in the excitement of imperial adventures, were far more than the benefits accruing from colonies. Hobson discovered that it was the financial interests of the capitalist class which drove these countries in annexing foreign lands as colonies. Hobson cautioned the British people about the new plutocratic phenomenon which had hijacked British foreign policy for an expansionist agenda at the cost of the ordinary people. He holds the phenomenon as an outgrowth of capitalism, as at one stage there was the problem of under-consumption in domestic markets and over-saving as domestic markets were not good enough for further investments. Wages being low, domestic markets had little purchasing power, and capitalists needed the opening up of new undeveloped markets to sell their products and ensure higher returns on their investments. All major industrial powers competed for colonies for these twin purposes. Within each imperialist regime, Hobson held, the dominant motive was to secure markets for export and investment, and motives other than these like power and glory were only secondary.

Hobson’s starting point, which was to become axiomatic to the entire debate on imperialism, was the problem of the economic surplus that capitalism generated. The downsizing of production processes and new technologies that an increasingly competitive domestic market generated boosted productivity beyond the market’s capacity to consume its output, leaving a glut of both commodities and, since reinvestment was thus rendered pointless, of profits. The solution lay in undeveloped markets overseas. Hence imperialism is an outlet for surplus. Since it only benefited a plutocratic few and directed national expenditure toward warfare and away from socially beneficial undertakings, Hobson recommended that imperialism be discontinued in favour of an income redistribution that would produce a more equitable and domestically viable form of capitalism.

Rudolf Hilferding, a leading German Social Democrat, in his work Das Finanzkapital (Finance Capital), published in 1910, held that financial institutions including big banks controlled industrial enterprises in the last stage of capitalism, i.e. the stage of finance capitalism. At this stage, in order to check dwindling profits, capitalism did away with competition and united to use state power to multiply its profitability. The capitalist class, having a monopoly over their domestic market, vied for imperialist expansion for the supply of raw materials, markets of industrial products and avenues for investments. All big European powers were monopoly capitalists. This led to bitter rivalry resulting in the Great War.

Rosa Luxembourg, a Social Democrat leader in Germany, in her study Accumulation of Capital (1913) underlined the unequal relationship between the imperial powers and the colonies. The European powers secured captive markets and very profitable avenues for investment. The colonies were reduced to mere suppliers of raw materials and foodstuffs to be consumed by metropolitan industries and citizenries respectively.

Vladimir Lenin’s thesis on imperialism is highly influential as he was the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution of Russia in 1917 and a major ideologue within the Marxian school, and hence the theory requires more attention. In his work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) he tries to defend Marx by explaining that revolution eluded the advanced capitalist countries, denying the foresight of Marx because imperialism blurred the class distinction. These countries by extracting massive resources from colonies improved working-class conditions at home. The working class of the metropolitan countries benefited, like the capitalist class, in relation to the exploited and dehumanized lots in the colonies and thus blunted the class contradiction. Lenin observed capitalism undergoing change in the late 19th century, and this happening in a number of principal capitalist countries almost simultaneously. The new stage of capitalism entailed political, social and economic dynamics but the core of the change was the transformation of competitive capitalism into monopoly capitalism. As capitalism advanced, production units grew bigger and, further, they combined as trusts and cartels to form monopoly capitalism. Similarly in the financial sector banks grew bigger and combined to become even bigger again. At the next stage, monopoly capitalism and finance capitalism merged to form monopoly finance capitalism. These mergers of huge industrial and banking firms established monopolies which started to dominate national and international economies. Competition continued but only among relatively fewer giants. This ensuing competition led the monopoly capitalist nations to seek aggressively markets abroad for the investment of capital. The massive imperialistic drives led to the division of the rest of the world among these countries, destroying the liberty of the peoples and leaving them abjectly impoverished. The struggle for markets unleashed wars among these imperialist nations, but all-out war involving the training and arming of the working classes in different countries eventually would turn national wars into class war, and thus cause the demise of both imperialism and capitalism. Marx thus according to Lenin was right in his conclusion, only he paid inadequate attention to the final stage.⁴

Defending Marx, Lenin constructs a neat theory but the theory makes a self-defeating error by holding imperialism a consequence of monopoly finance capitalism. The fact is that monopoly finance capitalism materialized only in the first decade of the 20th century while imperialism had reached its heyday much earlier, and even the imperialist division of the world had been completed long before the first decade of the 20th century. A consequence simply cannot precede the cause.⁵

Kautsky had recognized that international capitalist cartels would lead to economic internationalism, which by economically interlocking states would prevent wars among them. Lenin denounced Kautsky for not seeing that the partitioning of world markets was proportionate to the national power of sovereign states and their economies. Lenin thus failed to adhere to the basic Marxist presumption that it is the economy which drives politics and not vice versa. Even historically his theorization suffers many inaccuracies. For instance, imperialism is not necessarily the product of the export of capital, and it is not always finance capital which forces nations to go to war. Even non-imperialist nations maintain high standards of living, and the import of capital may not lead to poverty of the importer country.⁶ The weaknesses of Lenin’s theorization do not diminish its salience within the body of literature on the issue, as Lenin was more an activist than a theoretician and his work on the theme was more strategic in nature than analytical. It did not suit the capitalist class to develop the domestic economy and raise the wages of the workers. He also held that imperial rivalry was the reason behind the First World War and therefore advised the Russian people to stay away from the War.

Non-economic explanations

The sway of the leftist ideology in India led to an overemphasis on the economic explanations of imperialism in general and on that of Lenin in particular, despite the obvious anomaly that a pre-existing phenomenon had been accounted for with a later causation, i.e. finance capitalism. In fact, the popularity of the formulation of imperialism as a capitalist outgrowth was for another reason. The actual historical trajectory was mocking the so-called scientific theory of history; these explanations gave a new lease of life to the Marxian thesis of the end of capitalism, and later, while formal imperialism also withered away, neo-imperialism was hurriedly held as a factor to justify the apparent misconstruction of history. Ideological biases are counterproductive to the human good and therefore the non-economic explanations need serious perusal as they explain the historical and political bases of imperialism and help us to understand the present world order rather well without the burden of dogma.

Joseph Alois Schumpeter wrote the essay The Sociology of Imperialisms, published in 1919, during the First World War, and also wrote part of the book Imperialism and the Social Classes (1931). In this thesis, he dismisses capitalism as the driving force behind imperialism and holds them as two different phenomena. Imperialism existed long before capitalism emerged and thus instead of being a characteristic product of capitalism it is in fact antagonistic to capitalism. Capitalism, a modern-age phenomenon, is dynamic and productive, and does not require territorial possessions for its sustenance. G. D. H. Cole points out that Schumpeter’s concern is to stress

the essentially peaceable character of capitalism as such – by which he really means laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth-century type – and to argue that the phenomenon known as ‘economic imperialism’ is not truly a development of the inner working of capitalism, but rather the outcome of capitalist attachment to States largely dominated by militaristic castes and ideas.⁷

He defines imperialism as ‘the objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion’. Imperialism, to him, cannot be assigned any objective other than itself, it has ‘no adequate object beyond itself’.⁸

John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, in their article ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, published in The Economic History Review in 1953, the ideas later expanded into a full-length book Africa After the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism published in 1961 in conjunction with Alice Denny, turned the economic theories on its head. They observed that imperialism was a political function of integrating a new region into the expanding economy, but this was only indirectly connected with economic integration as it sometimes extends beyond areas of economic development for their strategic protection. And secondly, imperialism was not determined by the factors of economic expansion alone, but also equally by the political and social organization of the regions under im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Interpreting colonialism and nationalism
• 2 Early colonialism
• 3 Colonial Education
• 4 Contested histories of 1857 and the (re) construction of the Indian nation-state
• 5 Theorizing the 1857 revolt
• 6 Understanding the colonial subjects
• 7 Constitutional development in colonial India
• 8 Nationalist politics: early phase
• 9 Gandhi and nationalist politics
• 10 Quit India Movement
• 11 Colonialism and the women’s question
• 12 Social movements in colonial India
• 13 Political voices, colonial state and partition of India
• 14 Decolonization and colonial legacies
• Conclusion
• Index