Madhusree Mukerjee (1961-) Churchill's Secret War (2010)
The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II
To those who fell so that I could be born free
Chapter two. Harvesting the Colonies
...Famines were integral to India’s colonial experience, having been several times more frequent during the Victorian era, when tens of millions died of hunger, than during the Mughal period that had preceded the British. Although often triggered by drought, the famines were so lethal because India was exporting grain-some 10 million tons annually by 1900. Since the earliest days of imperial rule, the colony had sent abroad goods of greater value than it had received in return. (Only in the period 1856 to 1862, when investment for building railways entered India, did this flow reverse.) By the end of the Victorian period, India’s export constituted almost exclusively the products of its fields.
General Robert Clive’s victory in 1757 had drastically altered India’s economic relationship with the United Kingdom. “Very soon after Plassey, the Bengal plunder began to arrive in London, and the effect appears to have been instantaneous; for all authorities agree that the ‘industrial revolution,’ the event which has divided the nineteenth century from all antecedent time, began with the year 1760,” wrote nineteenth-century American historian Brooks Adams. The tribute from India, which amounted to almost a third of Britain’s national savings for the last three decades of the eighteenth century, financed trading networks, serving as lubricant for the new economic engine. It also enabled suddenly wealthy merchants to wrest power from the monarchy and stabilize the British parliamentary system, which would thereafter provide consistent support for their ventures. Ironically, the lack of liberty in the colonies subsidized the increasing political freedom in the United Kingdom.
...Targeted tariffs ensured that not only would Indian textiles fail to sell in England; they would often be more expensive than English textiles sold in India. English cottons paid at most 3.5 percent duty upon import into India, whereas native products were subjected to internal duties of up to 17.5 percent. As a result, Calcutta, which had sent to London £2 million worth of cotton goods in 1813, instead imported the same value of similar British goods in 1830. Dacca, whose translucent muslin had once evoked awe, became ghostly as its specialized craftsmen deserted or died of starvation.
...Such was the turn of the screw: to pay their rent, interest, and other dues, cultivators had to surrender their harvest, part of which was exported, thereby earning foreign exchange to pay for the charges, remittances, and imports (such as silver to maintain the flow of currency). The tax and interest demanded of the grower meant not only that his produce would be extracted and placed on the market but also that after meeting his liabilities he would have little money left with which to buy food for the family-which in turn boosted grain exports.
The advent of railways in the late 1850s had made matters worse. The Government of India guaranteed British financiers a 5 percent return on railway investment, compared with the 3 percent interest that banks offered. As a result, more than 25,000 miles of railway track, connecting every corner of the country, would be laid by 1900-“an impressive achievement indeed, but a very costly one too,” comments historian Dietmar Rothermund. He found that each mile of railway track cost Indian taxpayers 10,000 rupees for annual debt service, at a time when their average income varied from 20 to 30 rupees a year. As promised, trains helped to bring grain into famine-stricken locales, but that merely spread high grain prices over a broader area: whereas in an earlier era a famine would have killed many in a small region, now all the poorest in a larger region died.
To top it all, the Suez Canal opened in 1869, halving the shipping time from India to the British Isles. A few years later, export duties on wheat were eliminated and rail freight charges to the ports were reduced well below those for transport within the country. In consequence, a greater portion of the crop ended up abroad. During the last three years of the 1870s, a time of famine when millions starved to death, India sent abroad seven times more grain than during the first three years of that decade. The colony’s wheat crop was exported at such cheap rates that it determined international overall prices between 1870 and 1900.
...Whereas the colony and the colonizer probably had the same level of prosperity in the mid-eighteenth century (with Bengal having been richer than this average), by the end of the Victorian era the per capita income in the United Kingdom was twenty times that in India. The industrial revolution and imperial policy had plugged India smoothly but asymmetrically into the global economy, such that the high incomes abroad siphoned off a good part of the grain that the land revenue system extruded onto the market. Because the grain was free to follow the cash out of the country, this forced-feedback loop went by the name of free trade.