Something about 1757-1947 British Occupied World

Introduction

British rule in India lasted about 200 years. It officially began with Robert Clive winning the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and ended on August 15, 1947. Everyone in India is familiar with the Country's independence movement. India had several rulers, the most recent being Britain, who ruled for a long time. India was colonized by the British for a longer period, and freedom fighters had to dream of driving the British out of India and living a free life. Indians were subject to some restrictions and lacked personal freedom. Indians believe in many superstitions which sometimes make life difficult. Many freedom fighters worked hard to remove Sati Pratha from society. They fought for the rights of widows and started the education system for girls. So, to help people live peaceful lives, India's freedom fighters have joined hands and pledged to save the people of India. Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh, Rani Laxmi Bai, Veer Savarkar, and other prominent independence fighters led the charge liberated from British rule. Apart from these independence fighters, there were others whose only motive was to liberate India from British control. However, for various reasons, we are not familiar with their faces. They sacrificed their life and happiness for a better tomorrow for the nation. Birsa Munda, Kamala Das, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Khudiram Bose, and others are among them. Their contributions must be valued as much as we value the contributions of well-known freedom fighters. With these popular faces, we somehow forget the faces of those who contributed to the freedom struggle India has gone through many struggles for independence and many people lost their lives in that process. Countless men, women, and children gave their lives fighting the British so that India could be free. These people or freedom fighters are known to have sacrificed their lives to make India an independent country. On August 24, 1608, the British landed in India at Surat. While India has a rich and documented history dating back thousands of years to the Indus Valley Civilizations of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, Britain did not have a native written language after India until nearly 3,000 years ago in the 9th century. So how could the British have occupied and controlled this huge country from 1757 to 1947? Britain made its first attempt to establish overseas settlements in the 16th century. Driven by commercial ambitions and competition with France, maritime expansion accelerated in the 17th century and led to the establishment of settlements in North America and the West Indies. By 1670, Anglo-Americans had established colonies in New England, Virginia, and Maryland, and established settlements in Bermuda, Honduras, Antigua, Barbados, and Nova Scotia. Jamaica was acquired by conquest in 1655, and the Hudson's Bay Company established itself in northwestern Canada in the 1670s. The East India Company started to establish trading posts in India in 1600, and the Straits Settlements (Penang, Singapore, Malacca, and Labuan) expanded to become Britain through the company's activities. The first permanent British settlement on the African continent was established in 1661 on James Island in the River Gambia. The slave trade began in Sierra Leone, but the area did not become a British possession until 1787. The British acquired the Cape of Good Hope (now in South Africa) in 1806, under British control, Bull and British pioneers opened up the South African interior. They had more economic power, better weapons, and certain European confidence, which allowed them to slowly penetrate the Indian subcontinent until it ruled the sprawling country. A sea route linking Europe and India came into the limelight in 1498 when the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama arrived in Calicut. This made India the focal point of the European trade circle, with European powers flocking to Asia to gain their trading posts. Although initially, the main motivation was trade, slowly the European powers became more interested in acquiring territories. The British are one of these powers seeking money and action. The British East India Company was established under a charter granted by Queen Elizabeth in 1600. As earlier known, the British AG was founded by John Watts and George White to trade with southern and southern Asian countries in the East. British merchants and nobles held shares in the joint-stock company. The British government had no control over the company, and they had no direct connection. The British East India Company came to India as a trader of spices, a very important commodity in Europe at the time, used to preserve meat. In addition to this, they mainly trade in silk, cotton, indigo dye, tea, and opium. In 1613, the Mughal emperor Jahangir granted Captain William Hawkins a peasant, allowing the British to set up factories in Surat. In 1615, the ambassador to James I Thomas Rowe hired an imperial farmer from Jahangir to trade and establish factories throughout the Mughal Empire. Soon the Vijaynagar Empire also allowed the company to operate in Madeira with the opening of a factory in London, the British company began to surpass other European trading companies in its rising power. Almost all of these early settlements came from the businesses of specific corporations and giants, rather than any effort by the British Royal Family. The royal family exercised some powers of appointment and oversight, but the colonies were essentially self-governing enterprises. Empire formation was thus an unorganized process based on piecemeal acquisitions, and sometimes the British government was the least willing partner in the business. The British Empire consisted of dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor countries. It began with the establishment of overseas possessions and trading posts in England between the late 16th and early 18th centuries. At its peak, it was the largest empire in history and has been the most important global power for over a century. By 1913, the British Empire controlled more than 412 million people or 23% of the world's population at the time, and by 1920 it covered 35,500,000 square kilometers (13,700,000 square miles), or 24% of the Earth's total land area. As a result, its constitutional, legal, linguistic and cultural heritage is widely disseminated. At the height of its power, it was described as an "empire on which the sun never sets" because the sun always shines on at least one of its territories. During the great voyages of the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal and Spain pioneered European exploration of the Earth and built vast overseas empires. Jealous of the enormous wealth these empires created, Britain, France, and the Netherlands began to establish their colonies and trade networks in America and Asia. A series of wars with the Netherlands and France in the 17th and 18th centuries made England (the United Kingdom, after the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707) the leading colonial power in North America. After the East India Company conquered Mughal Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Britain became the dominant power in the Indian subcontinent. The American Revolutionary War caused Britain to lose some of its oldest and most populous colonies in North America in 1783. Attention then turned to Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. After France's defeat in the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), Britain became the major naval and imperial power in the 19th century and expanded its imperial territory. The period of relative peace (1815-1914) during which the British Empire became global hegemony was later described as "British Peace". In addition to Britain's formal control of its colonies, its dominance of world trade meant that it effectively controlled the economies of many regions, such as Asia and Latin America. Its white settler colonies gained increasing amounts of self-government, some of which were reclassified as dominions. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the royal family exercised control over its colonies mainly in the areas of trade and shipping. According to the mercantilist philosophy of the time, the colonies were seen as the source of necessary raw materials for Britain and were granted monopoly rights over their products such as tobacco and sugar in the British market. In return, they were expected to conduct all trade via British ships and serve as a market for British manufactured goods. The Navigation Act of 1651 and subsequent Acts created a closed economy between England and its colonies; all colonial exports had to be shipped to English markets on British ships, and all colonial imports had to go through England. This arrangement continued until the combined influence of Scottish economist Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776), the loss of the American colonies, and the development of the British free trade movement, slowly ending in the first half of the 19th century. By 1783, the American Revolution had caused Britain to lose some of its oldest and most populous colonies in North America. The United Kingdom's attention then turned to Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. After France's defeat in the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), Britain became the major naval and imperial power in the 19th century and expanded its imperial territory. The period of relative peace (1815-1914) during which the British Empire became global hegemony was later described as "British Peace". In addition to the formal control Britain exerted over its colonies, its dominance in world trade meant that it effectively controlled the economies of many regions, such as Asia and Latin America. Its white settler colonies gained increasing amounts of self-government, some of which were reclassified as dominions. The slave trade was of special importance to the British colonial economy in the Americas and became an economic necessity for the Caribbean colonies and the future American South. The movement to end slavery had borne fruit in the British colonies long before similar movements in the United States. Trade was abolished in 1807, and slavery itself came under British rule in 1833. Under the leadership of the likes of Robert Clive, James Wolfe, and Al Cooter, British military and naval power earned Britain two of the most important parts of its empire - Canada and India. In the first half of the 18th century, the wars of the British and French colonies in North America were local, but the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which ended the Seven Years' War (known in North America as the Anglo-Indian War), left British dominance in Canada. In India, the East India Company fought with the French India Company, but Robert Clive's military victories over French and Bengal rulers in the 1750s provided Britain with a great deal of territory and secured their future supremacy in India. By the early 20th century, Germany and the United States began to challenge Britain's economic leadership. Military and economic tensions between Britain and Germany were the main cause of World War I, during which Britain was heavily dependent on its empire. The conflict had put enormous pressure on its military, financial and human resources. Although the Empire achieved its greatest territorial reach immediately after World War I, Britain was no longer the preeminent industrial or military power in the world. During World War II, British colonies in East and Southeast Asia were occupied by the Japanese Empire. Despite the ultimate victory for Britain and its allies, the damage to British prestige accelerated the decline of the empire. India, Britain's most valuable and most populous territory, achieved independence as part of a larger movement of decolonization, in which Britain granted independence to most of the empire's territory. The Suez crisis of 1956 confirmed the decline of Britain as a global power, and the handover of Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997 marked the end of the British Empire for many. Fourteen overseas territories remain under British sovereignty. After independence, many former British colonies joined the Commonwealth, a free association of independent nations. Fifteen of them, including the United Kingdom, retain a common monarch, the current Queen Elizabeth II. Today there is neither agreement that [colonial] empires created hell, nor that protesting goodwill is an insufficient excuse. Countless anti-colonial thinkers and historians have attested to the morally bankrupt basis of the British Empire in terms of racism, violence, pillage, expropriation, and exploitation. India's anti-colonial leader, Mohandas Gandhi, adopted a strategy of nonviolent protest against the empire: "Let the people remember," he wrote in 1921, "that violence is the cornerstone of the government building." The ugly reality on the record is still tricky. According to a 2016 study, 43% of Britons think the empire is a good thing, and 44% think Britain's colonial past is a source of pride. A 2020 study shows that Britons are more likely than people in France, Germany, Japan, and other former colonial powers to say they want their country to still have an empire. As the UK prepares to take on a new role in the international order post-Brexit, an MoD-commissioned report on 'Renewing UK Intervention Policy' explicitly invokes nostalgic views of the Empire to revive the case for intervention: "Because of its Imperial history, Britain has preserved a tradition of global responsibility and the ability to project military power abroad." The British celebrate the virtuous heroism of the abolitionist movement that ended Britain's participation in the slave trade in 1807 but are often remembered as Britain's prioritization of slavery Central role in trade and the many forms of bonded labor exploited thereafter. The British record of humanitarianism overwhelms the British record of inhumanity. In the public memory, redemptive myths of colonial ascension have obscured a poor history of imperial looting and pillaging, policy-driven famines, brutal suppression of rebellions, torture, concentration camps, aerial policing, and everyday racism and humiliation. The balance sheet tries to show that the "goods" - trains, dams, the rule of law - outweigh the "bad" - the occasional excess of violence, and racism - although many of the so-called "goods" have ambiguous effects and are seriously flawed. The premise is that we can judge an inherently illegitimate and immoral system by anything other than illegitimate and immoral. The end of the empire, in particular, was extolled as a peaceful, voluntary, and gentlemanly transfer of power. Former Labour Prime Minister Clement Atlee declared in 1960: "There is but one Empire, in which, in the absence of external pressure or fatigue with the burden of domination, the ruling people voluntarily renounce their hegemony over their subjects and give they are free." The decolonization of India, Kenya, Malaysia, Cyprus, Egypt, Palestine, and many other colonies brought horrific violence—unlike the Holocaust and other modern crimes against humanity such as Hiroshima, none were a formal memorial or regret for them. We have not yet reached the conscience of this oblivion and the post-imperial age it occasionally brings. The public memory of the British Empire is governed by myth, in part because historians cannot explain how to hold the well-meaning Britons involved in its construction accountable. But how do we rightly negate the protests of serious people who have confidence in their moral integrity and inability to act injustice? "Hypocrisy" helps to describe but not to explain this human stupidity. No one thought they were hypocrites. Historical analysis framed by exposing hypocrisy acquires a tone of an indictment that undermines understanding. Not all rationalizations are cynical and transparent. We must take seriously the moral claims of historical actors to understand how ordinary people, acting within specific institutional and cultural frameworks, can, despite their good intentions, create astounding chapters of human history. The mystery here is real: how did the British understand and manage the ethical dilemmas posed by imperialism? To be sure, there is a story of "evil banality"—a story of ordinary people who automatically become accomplices of inhumanity and conform to the rules. But in the case of the British Empire, the bigger story may be that of the inhumane acts committed by individuals who are deeply concerned with their consciences, actually actively interrogating their consciences. How do these self-proclaimed "good" people endure bad things? If we can answer this question, we will be able to unravel many of the mysteries of today's British lack of conscience about the empire. Victorian historian J. R. Seeley said the British got it "out of mind", a quip most often used to portray the Empire in a charming and forgiving way, they were reluctant imperialists, providentially burdened with the burden of global domination. But Britain gained and maintained its empire, not so much for lack of conscience as for lack of or management of conscience. What we call "goodwill" is often an instance of the management of conscience—a kind of denial—necessary for the expansion of modern imperialism and industrial capitalism. A focus on intentions assumes a positive, unmediated conscience. Instead, we might ask how to manage conscience, and what makes individuals who engage in such crimes believe and claim that they are developing good intentions. The way the British did this made the historical reckoning of imperialism more complicated than the reckoning of Nazism's horrific goals. This is ironic given the longstanding diplomatic discourse about "treacherous Albion" - the idea that would have saved the Nazis in some way. The Nazis' goal was open killing - the "cleansing" of Europe - Britons are inherently disgraced and prone to a betrayal of promises (i.e. goodwill). But it's partly because the burden of this stereotype has fueled loud protests against goodwill, which many now see as more than evidence of its damaging effects. They cannot be redeemed by invoking "good faith" claims that make empires have violent effects. This is akin to arguing that having greater discretion over their murderous intent the ideology of the liberal empire needed decent cover and lasted longer because of it. The real value of good faith claims is that they reveal how the British managed their conscience against the evils of the Empire.