The History of British India: A Complete Guide

The British in India stayed 335 years and, in the end, gave it back. The story begins with a few wooden ships in the Indian Ocean, ends with the partition of the subcontinent and the death of perhaps a million people in communal violence, and contains within it most of the moral and political arguments that have shaped the writing of imperial history. There is no neutral way to tell it; there is, however, an honest way, which is to say what the British did, what they said they were doing, and how Indians at the time made sense of the difference.

The East India Company and the Early Trading Posts

The British presence in India began with the chartering of the East India Company by Elizabeth I in 1600. The company was given a monopoly on English trade with the East Indies, and it established its first factory (trading post) at Surat in 1612. The company gradually built a network of trading posts at Madras (1639), Bombay (1668), and Calcutta (1690), and it became the principal European commercial agent in India. The company’s trade focused on Indian textiles, particularly calicoes and muslins, and on spices from Southeast Asia. The early years of the company were marked by competition with the Dutch and Portuguese, and by the need to negotiate with the powerful Mughal Empire.

By 1700, the Mughal Empire was the largest political economy in the world, producing perhaps a quarter of global manufacturing output. The British were a small presence in it, and they were aware of it. As the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s court historian Khafi Khan wrote at the time, the English “have no swords in their hands, but they carry a sharper weapon — the pen.” It was, in the long run, a fair description of what the British would do in India.

The Battle of Plassey and the Conquest of Bengal

The Battle of Plassey of 1757 was the decisive event in the transformation of the company from trader to territorial ruler. The 1765 grant of the diwani in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa gave the company the financial resources to underwrite further expansion. Bengal, the richest province of the Mughal Empire, became the basis for the British Indian state, and the Bengal Famine of 1770, which killed perhaps 10 million people, was the most catastrophic single event of the early British presence.

As P. J. Marshall has shown, the British takeover of Bengal was as much the work of Indian collaborators — bankers like Jagat Seth, commanders like Mir Jafar, provincial officials like Nand Kumar — as it was of the company itself. The British arrived in Bengal at a moment of Mughal political collapse, and they were the principal beneficiaries of it. They did not, by themselves, replace the Mughals.

The Expansion of Company Rule

The conquest of Bengal was followed by a series of wars and annexations that extended British control over most of the subcontinent. The Anglo-Mysore Wars (1767–1799) brought the kingdom of Mysore, the most formidable military power in southern India, under British control, ending with the death of Tipu Sultan at the siege of Seringapatam in 1799. The Anglo-Maratha Wars (1775–1818) broke the Maratha Confederacy. The Anglo-Sikh Wars (1845–1849) annexed the Punjab, the last of the major Indian powers. By the mid-nineteenth century, the British controlled almost the entire subcontinent directly, with a long border of princely states that remained under Indian rulers.

The Indian Rebellion of 1857

The Indian Rebellion of 1857, also known as the Sepoy Mutiny or the First War of Independence, was the most serious challenge to British rule in India in the nineteenth century. The rebellion was triggered by several factors, including the introduction of the new Enfield rifle cartridges greased with animal fat, the annexation policies of Lord Dalhousie, and the broader grievances of the Indian population. The rebellion began with a mutiny of Indian sepoys at Meerut in May 1857 and spread across northern and central India, threatening the very existence of British rule. The rebellion was suppressed by the summer of 1858, but it led directly to the dissolution of the East India Company and the establishment of the British Raj.

The British reprisals, conducted by Generals John Nicholson and Hugh Wheeler, were severe. The siege of Cawnpore and the massacres at Satichaura and Bibighar became a permanent part of the British memory of 1857. The rebellion, as William Dalrymple has shown, marked a turning point in which the British in India ceased to see themselves as one of many foreign presences and began to imagine themselves as a permanent imperial ruling class.

The British Raj

The British Raj was the period of direct British rule in India, from 1858 to 1947. The Government of India Act of 1858 dissolved the East India Company and established direct crown governance through a viceroy and council. The British Indian Army became the principal instrument of British rule, and the Indian Civil Service, recruited through a competitive examination, became the principal instrument of British administration.

The Indian railways, the postal system, the telegraph, and the legal code were major British contributions to the modernisation of India, although the benefits of this modernisation were unevenly distributed. The Indian famines of the late nineteenth century, particularly the catastrophic famine of 1876–1878 and the famine of 1899–1900, were the most devastating failures of the British administration. The 1899–1900 famine, which killed perhaps 1.25 million people, prompted Viceroy Lord Curzon to remark that “any sensible man” would have to admit that the British had failed the Indians they ruled.

The Indian Independence Movement

The Indian independence movement was the largest and most influential anti-colonial movement of the twentieth century. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, was the principal political party, and the Muslim League, founded in 1906, represented the political aspirations of India’s Muslim minority. The rise of Indian nationalism in the late nineteenth century produced a series of mass movements, including the Swadeshi movement of 1905–1908, the non-cooperation movement of 1920–1922, and the civil disobedience movement of 1930–1934.

Mahatma Gandhi, who had returned to India from South Africa in 1915, emerged as the leading figure of the independence movement, and he was the principal author of the strategy of non-violent resistance. As Gandhi wrote in Young India in 1928: “Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.” The Amritsar massacre of 1919 and the suppression of the Quit India movement in 1942 were the most violent moments of the British response. The contemporary Indian response to British rule, as Partha Chatterjee has argued, was less a derivative of European nationalism than a separate and parallel development.

The Independence of India and Pakistan

The independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 was the central event of the post-war era. The decision to partition British India into two new states, one Hindu-majority and one Muslim-majority, was announced in June 1947 and implemented on 14 and 15 August 1947. The partition produced one of the largest migrations in human history, with an estimated 10 to 15 million people crossing the new borders, and a devastating communal violence that killed perhaps 1 million people. As the historian Yasmin Khan has written in The Great Partition (2007), the violence of partition was a direct consequence of the political decisions taken in 1946 and 1947, in particular the decision to hold a quick transfer of power.

The British withdrawal from India was the single most important event in the decline of the British Empire, and it marked the end of the British presence in South Asia.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of British India is unusually rich and unusually contested. The older Cambridge School — represented by Anil Seal, John Gallagher, and C. A. Bayly — produced a national school of imperial history that treated Indian nationalism as a derivative of British politics. The Indian nationalist historians, from R. C. Dutt to Sumit Sarkar’s Modern India (1983), gave us the more familiar account of imperial exploitation and resistance. The Subaltern Studies group, founded in the early 1980s, attempted to recover the voices of the peasants and workers who had been left out of both traditions. The current debate, exemplified in the work of Partha Chatterjee, Gyan Pandey, and David Ludden, is over how to write the history of a country whose modernisation was, in the long run, a deeply political process.

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