British Colonialism In India

The British Colonialism in India made several structural changes to Indian economy as well as boosted the country’s economic growth. Nevertheless, India’s economic development was not fully encouraged during the British colonization, and this was mainly because of a steady drain of Indian wealth into Britain. The term ‘drain’ refers to a portion of national product of India, which was not available for domestic consumption, but was being drained away to Britain, and India was not getting adequate economic or material returns for it. This drain was consisted of debts of British East India Company, salaries and pensions of civil and military officials, interests on loans taken by the Indian Government from abroad, profits on foreign investment

Similarly, the development of infrastructure such as roads and railways was not coordinated with India’s industrial needs; instead, the net effect of the railways was to enable foreign goods to outsell indigenous products. Furthermore, during the British Colonization, India’s handicraft industry was destroyed as cheap and machine-made imports from Britain flooded the Indian market. The loss of traditional livelihood should be compensated by a process of industrialization in India; however, deindustrialization was occurred instead which lead to famine in the city. This subsequently caused reverse migration, as people migrate from urban to rural area to do agriculture, which then resulted in increasing pressure on land and overburdened agriculture sector. The village economic set up was also affected, and India has transformed from net exporter to net importer. Regarding agricultural sector, there was little spending by Government on improving land productivity, since its only interest was to maximize rents and secure its share of

Certain specialized crops such as cotton and jute began to be grown not for consumption in the village but for sale in the national and even international markets. Still, the peasants were affected by the fluctuations in the international markets and given the subsistent level at which they lived, there was hardly any surplus for them in investing in commercial crops. Perhaps, the commercialization trend reached the highest level of development in the plantation sector such as tea, coffee and rubber, which was mostly owned by Europeans. Finally, at the same time as commercialization of Indian Agriculture, modern machine-based industries started coming up in India, but most of them were foreign-owned and controlled by British managing agencies. Indian-owned industries also came up in cotton textiles and jute in the nineteenth century and in sugar, cement, etc.in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, they were suffered from credit problems, no tariff protection by Government, unequal competition from foreign companies, and stiff opposition from British capitalist interests who were backed by sound financial and technical infrastructure at