British India

British India, the Raj, was the direct Crown administration of the subcontinent from 1858 to 1947. It replaced the East India Company, whose rule the rebellion of 1857 had discredited beyond saving. The Company had governed a fifth of humanity as a commercial concern; the Crown took over its territories, its army and its debts. Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1876. The system rested on a tiny British cadre - the Indian Civil Service never exceeded about twelve hundred men - governing through Indian clerks, police and soldiers, and through some five hundred and sixty princely states left nominally sovereign under British paramountcy. What it built was real and double-edged. Railways, canals, telegraphs, a codified legal system and universities were all constructed, and so was an economy reoriented to supply raw cotton and buy British cloth. Famine recurred throughout: the 1876-78 famine killed several million, and the Bengal famine of 1943 killed perhaps three million while grain was exported and shipping was refused. Indian soldiers fought in both world wars in enormous numbers, over two and a half million volunteers in the second. The nationalist movement grew from the Indian National Congress of 1885 into a mass campaign under Gandhi after 1919. The Amritsar massacre that year, when troops fired on a penned crowd, destroyed the moral case for the Raj among many who had accepted it. Britain left in August 1947, administratively exhausted and financially indebted to India. Partition into India and Pakistan followed within weeks. Somewhere between one and two million people died and around fifteen million were displaced.

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