‘The British plunder of subcontinent’

1. According to the research by Utsa Patnaik whose a renowned economist, Britain drained a total of $45 trillion from 1765 to 1938. It's a staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than the total annual GDP of UK today.
2. According to British economic historian Angus Maddison, subcontinent's share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together when the Mughals ruled. By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent.
3. Shashi Tharoor claims that 35 million died in famines; London ate India’s bread while people starved.

4. In 1943, four million Bengalis died in British engineered famines. It was their own fault, according to the odious Churchill, for “breeding like rabbits”.
5. Ramsay MacDonald estimated that in 1920s, 7500 Englishmen were receiving 20 million pounds annually from British Raj as pension.

6. Salary of the Secretary of State for British Raj in 1901, paid for by Indian taxes, was equivalent to average annual income of 90,000 Indians.
7. 19th century Indian nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji has argued that the subcontinent exported an average of £13,000,000 worth of goods to Britain each year from 1835 to 1872 with no corresponding return of money.

8. By 1890 about 6,000 officials of Raj ruled 250 million people.
9. Taxation by the East India Company—usually at a minimum of 50 per cent of income—was so onerous that two-thirds of the population ruled by the British in the late eighteenth century fled their lands. Durant writes that ‘[tax] defaulters were confined in cages, and exposed...
..to the burning sun; fathers sold their children to meet the rising rates’.

10. In 1922, 64% of the total revenue of British Raj was devoted to paying for British Indian troops despatched abroad. No other army in the world consumed so large a proportion of public revenues.
11. In 1757, under the command of Clive, the Company won a victory in Plassey over the ruling nawab, Siraj-ud-Daula of Bengal. Clive transferred the princely sum of £2.5 million (£250 million pounds in today’s money) to the Company’s coffers in England as the spoils of conquest.
12. On his first return to England Clive took home £234,000 from his Indian exploits (£23 million pounds in today’s money, making him one of the richest men in Europe). Clive came back to India in 1765 and returned 2 years later with a fortune of £400,000 (£40 million today).
13. While the British had the gall to call him ‘Clive of India’, as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that a good portion of the country belonged to him.
14. The subcontinent had enjoyed a 25% share of the global trade in textiles in the early eighteenth century. But this was destroyed; the Company’s own stalwart administrator Lord William Bentinck wrote that ‘the bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India’.
15. The value of Bengal’s textile exports alone is estimated to have been 16 million rupees annually in 1750s, of which some 5 to 6 million rupees’ worth was exported by European traders in India. At those days’ rates of exchange, the sum was equivalent to almost £2 million
16. When the British ruled India, they cut off the export markets for Indian textiles. Soldiers of the East India Company systematically smashed the looms of Bengali weavers and, according to one contemporary account 'breaking their thumbs so they could not ply their craft’
17. A stark illustration of the devastation this caused could be seen in Dhaka, once the great centre of Muslim production, whose population fell from several lakhs in 1760 to about 50,000 by the 1820s
18. With the collapse of its manufacturing and the elimination of manufactured goods from its export rosters, the share of world manufacturing exports from today's India, Pakistan and Bangaldesh fell from 27 per cent to 2 per cent under the British rule.
19. The British had a standing army of 325,000 men by the late 19th century, two thirds of which was paid for by Indian taxes. Every British soldier posted in the British Raj had to be paid, equipped, fed and eventually pensioned by people of subcontinent, not of Britain.
20. By the end of the 19th century, India was Britain’s biggest source of revenue, world’s biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and soldiers all at India’s own expense. We literally paid for our own oppression.
The subcontinent which comprises of today's India, Pakistan and Bangladesh was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in the subcontinent.
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