The Impact Of Colonialism In India

India was colonized by many European super powers. The Biggest one among them was Britain. Today India is termed as a 'developing ' country. Although it does possess adequate wealth and Human resources to compete with some of the biggest global forces, It is an accepted fact that India is lags behind a lot of countries. What is the reason for this? Indias backwardness has its genesis in Colonialism.

I believe that the above statement is unquestionably true, and in the follwing peice I will explain why.

Lets understand what colonialism does to a country. To start with, looking at 10 of the poorest countries in the world based on their GDP per capita today, Malawi is the poorest and Guinea completes the list as the 10th poorest in the

Perhaps the biggest impact of British rule in India was that they reformed the Indian economy into a Colonial Economy, i.e., one who 's activity was determined by British necessities. 300 years worth of hard Indian labour and resources spent and no economic growth to show for. India basically stagnated from 1600 to 1900 while the European industrialization and the American revolution ensured that the rest of the world moved ahead during the same period. While India had 33.7% share of the world income in 1 AD, it has reduced to roughly 5% today, both due to its downfall and the acent of the world as a whole. Much of this downfall was experienced under the Colonial rule. According to the famous Economic Historian Angus Maddison, in his book The World Economy: India was the richest country in the world and had the world 's largest economy until 1600 AD. Co-incidentally, it was the same year that The East India Company set foot in India. India was a leading manufacturing country in the world in the early 18th century. Colonialism weakened agriculture and “deindustrialized” India, throwing millions of artisans out of work. Britain changed the old land revenue system, farmers now had to now pay revenue whether or not the monsoon failed and this led to famines. As a result of this, and other such unreasonable laws, India has had to endure 15 major famines claiming roughly 55.5 million lives. This figure makes the 6 million people killed by Hitler in The Holocaust look

What made me research and write on this topic was a devastating photo that was forwarded to me a couple of days ago. In the photo a somalian boy aged aroud 11 - 12 was directly consuming the urine of a cow while it was excreting. This is not directly related to backwardness of the countires due to colonialism, but it got me thinking. Somalia is backward mainly because of its geographical disadvantages and lack of resourses. But SOMALIA WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER OFF IF IT WAS NOT COLONIZED. Egypt, Britian , Italy, france and Ethiopia colonized Somalia whereas India had the Dutch , Portuguese, French and Britian who came to colonize. It is not right to bring a comparision between these two countries because India has a larger population and land area, it is geographically better off, 75% is agricultural land whereas in somalia its 53%, literacy rate in somalia is only 24% of the population, but what i am trying to bring to light is that both of these countries were ruthlessly colonized to such an extent that they in the present day face