British colonies in Asia

New Imperialism in Asia

India

In the 17 th century, the expanding British arrived in India and there, after taking a small portion of land, became known as the British East India Company. The British completely took over most of the country of India, a process starting with Bengal in 1757 and ending in Punjab in 1849, leaving out certain princely states. This was aided by the decline of the Mughal Empire in India which left a power vacuum since the death of Aurangzeb and the increased British forces in India because of conflicts with France. A kind of ship called clipper ships were engineered and their larger sails were able to catch the wind and cut the trip to India from Europe in half from 6 months to 3 months. The British also laid cables on the floor of the ocean allowing telegrams to be sent from India and China. In 1818, the British controlled most of India and began imposing their ideas and ways on India but it wasn’t really a kind of take over. The British were working together with Indian officials. A few of these new impositions were different succession laws that allowed the British to take over a state with no successor and gain its land and armies, new taxes and monopolistic control of industry. The different Hindu and Muslim Sepoys triggered the Indian Mutiny which spread to become the First Indian War of Independence. Following this war administrative functions were transferred from the chartered British East India Company to the British government in 1858.

After this revolt was brutally suppressed by the British, India came under the direct control of the British crown. After the British had gained more control over India, they began changing around the financial state of India. Previously Europe had to pay for Indian textiles and spices in bullion. With political control, Britain directed farmers to grow cash crops for the company for exports to Europe while India became a market for textiles from Britain. In addition it collected huge revenues from land rent and taxes on its acquired monopoly on salt production. Indian weavers were replaced by new spinning and weaving machines and Indian food crops were replaced by cash crops like cotton and tea causing widespread famines.^[7]

The British also began connecting Indian cities by railroad and telegraph to make travel and communication easier for the British in India and began building its irrigation system for increasing agri cultural production. When Western education was introduced in India, Indians were quite influenced by it, but the glaring inequalities between the British ideals of governance and their treatment of Indians became clear. In response to racist treatment, the educated Indians and the ones that knew such inequality was occurring decided to establish the Indian National Congress that demanded that Indians be recognized as equals with the British and that they have the right to govern themselves.

John Robert Seeley a Cambridge Professor of History said "Our acquisition of India was made blindly. Nothing great that has ever been done by englishmen was done so unintentionally or accidentally as the conquest of India". According to him the political control of India was not a conquest in the usual sense because it was not an act of a state.

British colonies in Asia

The new administrative arrangement, crowned with Queen Victoria's proclamation as Empress of India in 1876, effectively replaced the rule of a monopolistic enterprise with that of a trained civil service headed by graduates of Britain's top universities. The administration retained and increased the monopolies held by the company. The India Salt Act of 1882 included regulations enforcing a government monopoly on the collection and manufacture of salt and in 1923 a bill was passed doubling the salt tax.^[8]

After taking control of much of India, the British expanded further into Singapore, Burma and Malaya (modern day Malaysia) and these became further sources of trade and raw materials for British goods. They also went into Afghanistan and Tibet to counter Russian expansion.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14