Beginning of the British empire in India in 1757 and its eclipse in 1947 provide a very important chapter of the modern world history. How could a tiny island with a small population, located thousands of kilometers away and having no land links with India, reach Indian shores and emerge, step by step, her master? The present day faster means of transport and communication did not exist then and it would take almost six months for a ship to reach India from England. Early British historians used to boast that they conquered India with Indian blood and Indian money. If so, should we not ponder as to how a country, many times bigger in size and population than England, lost her freedom! Similarly, who could have imagined that an empire, which was at the peak of her military and civilisational strength and appeared to be invincible, would crumble down in less than a century against the freedom struggle of an unarmed people!
Both these developments are not less than a miracle of history. They could not have happened in a vaccum. To understand them we should place them in a global context. The first question we face: What brought the Englishmen to India and when. This question takes us to the middle of the fifteenth century, when all the sea and land trade routes between India and Europe was restless to have direct access to Indian markets. Since many centuries before Christ, Europe was importing Indian textiles, spices, jewellery and other luxury goods. But now they had to pay very heavy price to the intermediary Arab traders.
Sea-route for Trade with India
It was in this backgournd that the Pope, supreme head of the Christian world, by an order called Papal Bull, authorized the two western most European States—Spain and Portugal- to explore alternative all-water routes to India. Consequently, and Italian navigator Columbus in the employ of Spain sailed westward and reached an unknown island. He took it to be India, named her Indies and her inhabitants Indians. After many years it could be ascertained that the newly discovered island was not India and, therefore, it was named as West Indies. Meanwhile, a Portuguese navigator, Vasco de Game, taking a round of the African continent in 1498 landed at Calicut on the western coast of India. Thus, Europe’s quest to reach India led to the discovery of new continents resulting in the formation of the present map of the world.
With Pope’s blessings and authority, kingdoms of Spain and Portugal acquired monopoly over the newly discovered lands, their wealth and maritime trade. Drawing an arbitrary line from north to south, the Pope authorized Portugal to established her monopoly over the east and Spain over the west of this line. Portugal soon established her trading centres, called factories, in almost all major trading ports on the Indian coast. Some of the Indian Princes gave them all support. Soon they started their fortification. By 1510, they captured Goa and became a political power. There, they also indulged in a large scale conversion of Hindus to Christianity. As a result, they lost the Indian sympathy and became very unpopular. Their ships laden with booty, merchandise and slaves started roaming over the seas. It aroused intense jealousy and rivalry among other European states. Their faith in the Pope’s neutrality and religious authority was shaken.
Coincidently, religious reforms protest led by Martin Luther, Knox and Colvin was also taking shape. The period of world exploration taking shape. The period of world exploration thus witnessed the era of religious conflict as well. This led to the rise of Protestantism ( protect against the supremacy and authority of the Pope ) and breaking away from his Roaman Catholic Church. Tiny Holland, situated on sea-coast and having expertise in navigation, took the lead. England followed it. They started piracy and looting of Portuguese and Spanish domination over the territory. In 1588, joint forces of Holland and England destroyed Channel. Thus, the order imposed by the Pope was challenged. The Dutch ships with English sailors on them sailed towards India and eastern islands like Java and Sumatra.
In 1600 A.D. , English East India Company was established in India. Two years later, Holland established a Dutch Eastern Company. The Dutch were instrumental in destroying the Portuese monopoly over Indian trade. Subsequently, they established their factories all along the Indian coast. In 1612, through the efforts of Sir Thomas Roe, the English East India Company was able to procure a firman (authority for trade) from the Mughal trading port. From collaborators, Holland and England became competitors and rivals to each other. With a large scale massacre of Englishmen at Ambyona (Indonesia) in 1623 the Ehglish left Java for the Dutch and decided to concentrate on India.
Gradually, the English East India Company also establish its chain of factories in all important trading centers in India. The French were the last to enter this race. The French East India Company was created in 1664. The first French factory was opened at Surat in 1668 and a ship loaded with a rich cargo of clothing materials, sugar, pepper and indigo was sent back to Madagascar, and island in the Arabian Sea. Madagascar had been colonized as a transit station between France and India. The France extended their trading activities to the east coast also. They founded their factories at Masulipatam, Pondicherry and Chandernagore. They made Pondicherry as their headquarter. Denmark also tried to enter this race. In fact, she cr4eated an East India Company of her won, but her activities were mostly confined to Tranquebar on Coromandel Coast and Serampore in Bengal. It was a minor player in this game. Thus a keen competition started among various European states for getting a foothold on Indian soil and to grab the maximum share of its trade.
This competition was not confined to India alone. It acquired a global character. There was a scramble to acquire colonies in the new world, particularly in the northern continent, which is nowadays known as North America. The Dutch, the English and the French joined the race. The Spanish in fluence was limited to South America. Africa became the source of slave trade. Islands scattered in different seas were also colonized. Holland being located on the mainland became and easy victim of the imperial expansions, first of Spain and later of Spain and later of France. England being an island was not much affected by the continental politics and could concentrate her energies abroad . With the passage of time, France and England emerged as the main competitors in India as well as North America.
Three Carnatic Wars( 1746-63) were fought between England and France in South India. Their rivalry was ultimately settled in favour of England in the year 1763. The French presence in India remained confined to Pondicherry in the South and Chandernagore in Bengal. Having found a political foothold in Bengal, the British were left alone to pursue their imperial designs in India . In 1776, the British colonies in North America supported by France declared themselves independent of the mother country, The American declaration of independence came as a set back of Britain but became a landmark in the long journey of human liberty.
Now it was the turn of France. The French Revolution broke out in1789, with a slogan of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. It destroyed the monarchy, but ended in the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. With his eyes on India, Napolion conquered Egypt (1798) and thought of a plan to construct Suez Canal. However, he got himself involved in the continental wars and invited his own doom by invading the frost-covered Russia. Britain gained maximum from the conflicts among the European powers. She captured all the Dutch colonies in India, Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and many islands on way to India. Britain emerged as the leader of anti Napoleon European coalition. It was under the leadership of Arther Wellesley that Napoleon met his final defeat at the battlefield of Waterloo (1815). The defeated Napoleon was made a prisoner and exiled to the island of St. Helena, where he breathed his last.
Emergence of Britain as Super Power
After Waterloo, Britain emerged as the unchallenged super power on the world stage. In India, too, she emerged as the paramount power after the final defeat and collapse of the Maratha confederacy in 1818. The Mughal empire did exist but only in name having no power and no teeth left with it. The British had already established their authority by replacing the Maratha domination at Delhi in 1803.
It is an interesting coincidence of history that the rise and expansion of the British power in India progressed hand in hand with a scientific and technological revolution in Europe. Battle of Buxar of 1764 marks the first decisive military success of the English East India Company in India. IN 1768, steam power was invented in England. It became a vehicle of the great Industrial Revolution, which gave birth to machine civilization. Fast means of transport and communication such as steam engine, steamship and telegraph were being invented. In fact, Europe started undergoing a radical transformation. Old social, economic and political institutions started giving way to the new ones. Europe’s relationship with its colonies was also changing. Now England and other European countries needed markets for their surplus production and also raw material for their machines to produce more. In the scale of material civilization Europe was going higher and Asia was sinking low. Proud of its material progress and new civilization Europe’s ego took a racial colour. Asia and Africa were looked upon as sources of raw materials and markets for European production. It needs to be noted that by 1914, practically the whole of Asia and Africa and some other parts of the world had gone into the hands of one European colonial power or the other.
Steamer was introduced in India in 1835. In the same year first medical college on western lines was opened at Calcutta(Kolkata). In 1835, Macaulay gave his verdict in favour of English education, which meant imparting of European knowledge through English medium. Macaulay’s aim was to create a class of Indians who would be Indian in colour and blood, but Englishmen in tastes, ideals and morals. England looked at India as a jewel in the crown of her vast empire. India with her vast land and large population could both be a supplier of raw materials and a market for British industrial production.
While Britain was expanding and strengthening her administrative grip over India, Europe was torn between competitive nationalism unleashed by the French Revolution. Different nation-states were fighting for colonies in Africa for raw materials, for more and more markets. Motivated by the desire to reach sea boundaries, Russia was trying to expand to the east, to the south and to the west, thus posing a danger to the British hegemony in India. The focus of British foreign and defence policies throughout the nineteenth century lay in India. Britain had created and elaborate defence structure right from England on both sides of India. And, therefore, to check Russia’s southward expansion became Britain’s main concern. As a result, Britain assumed the role of a protector of the Ottoman empire of Turkey against the rising tide of nationalism in eastern Europe. The people there were groaninig under the Ottoman rule for centuries. On the other hand, Russia emerged as a supporter of the eastern Europeans, who were opposed to the Muslim rule of Turkey. This Anglo-Russian rivalry flared up in the Crimean war of 1854-56.
In Asia, Britain tried to check Russia’s southward advance in Persia. She also fought two disastrous wars in Afghanistan under the pretext of forestalling the Russian advance. In India Lord Dalhousie(1846-56) was in a hurry to conquer the whole of the country. He was determined to bring under the British as large an area as possible. His main aim was the expansion of British export to India. The instrument through which he implemented his policy of expansionism was the ‘Doctrine of Lapse’ about which you would read in the next chapter.
As told earlier, the European powers everywhere began with economic ambitions. These were followed by political ambitions to be followed by what may be termed as a religious agenda. Trade led to political conquest and political power was used to propagate Christianity. In India, the Portuguese led the way. The English East India Company in the name of religious neutrality was giving maximum support and encouragement to Christianity. The cartridges greased with the prohibited cow and pig fat were introduced in the army. This action proved counter-productive and became the immediate cause of the great upheaval of 1857. What is relevant here to remember is the failure of this upheaval and the famous theory of evolution by an English thinker Charles Darwin. According to this theory, through a long process of natural selection man had descended not from Adam but from Ape. The theory also propounded the idea of continuous struggle for existence leading to the survival of the fittest.
This theory of evolution revolutionized the whole thinking of Europe and America. The British victory over the Indian rebellion was seen as a victory of civilization over barbarism. A new theory of “White man’s Burden” was created. European civilization in Asia, Africa, Australia and America was interpreted as a civilizing mission entrusted to the white races by God or Destiny. The British conquest of India was also seen as a part of the same civilizing mission. The failure of the 1857 upheaval turned out to be the end of an era and beginning of a new one .
But Europe was riven with rivalries. The German and Italian nationalisms were struggling for political unity. The German speaking people were divided into many small independent states and so were the Italian people. Powerful intellectual movements were sweeping people were divided into many small independent states and so were the Italian people . Powerful intellectual movements were sweeping both the nationalisms. The German nationalism saw France as the main enemy in the way of her political unity. The Italian nationalism, on the other hand, saw Austria as the main obstacle. The German nationalism looked towards Great Britain for support against its traditional rival France and this support was readily available. This Anglo-German collaboration against France manifested itself in intellectual field also. A young German Sanskrit scholar Max Muller migrated to England in 1846 and till his death England and Germany. Max Muller did his maximum to popularize the idea of an Aryan race and the Aryan invasion of India. In fact, his theory laid the foundation of a racial interpretation of India’s manifold diversity—social, religious, linguistic and regional. This Aryan invasion theory was used as an intellectual instrument to further the well-known British policy of divide and rule as well as convert the British policy of divide and rule as well as convert the British political conquest into a permanent cultural conquest.
Anyhow, under the leadership of the Prussian Chancellor Bismark, German nationalism achieved its goal of political unification in 1871 after a bloody war against France and with open British support on diplomatic front. The same year unification of Italy was also achieved. But Britain’s happiness over the emergenceof these new states on the map of Europe turned out to be short-lived. United Germany was in a hurry to join the race of industrialisation, trade and colonization. As a matter of fact, she paid utmost attention to industrialization and militarization and colonies. She created a powerful navy to back her claims. Within two decades of German unification in 1871, Britain discovered that Germany had ceased to be her friend and had become her main rival.
As a part of her Asian policy, Germany started befriending Turkey and planned a Berlin-Baghadad Railway Project. This was seen by Britain as a great danger to her interests in Asia, more particularly in India. After 1890, the German activities became the main concern of British foreign and defence policies. Britain decided to mend fences with her two traditional enemies—France and Russia. She soon entered into friendship treaties with both of them. Russia was already in a depressed state of mind because of the humiliating defeat she had suffered in 1905 at the hands of a tiny Asian country Japan. This defeat of a great European power aroused great enthusiasm and hopes in the Asian mind.
Two World Wars
Turkey because of her tilt towards Germany also lost the British support which earlier had saved her against Russian expansionism and independence struggles in Eastern Europe. Now Britain was no more interested in stopping the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. This became evident in the 1912-13 Balkan Wars which led to the independence of the independence of the states like Rumania and Bulgaria from Turkish rule. The changing British attitudes towards Germany and Turkey as well as her traditional rivals France and Russia only proved the age-old maxim that in politics there are no permanent friends and enemies and that there are only permanent interest . This widening gulf between the British and the German interests was t he main cause behind the First World War of 1914-18 , although the immediate cause appeared to be the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of the Austrian Emperor at Sarajevo on 28 June1914.
Britain and her allies like France emerged victorious in the first World War.The defeated Germany lost all her newly earned overseas colonies. Her military machine was dismantled. Her own territorriies were reduced and were distributed among her neighbours. All her friends like Austria and Turkey were equally punished. The Europe’s map was redrawn and a new state called Czechoslovakia was created in her heart. Russia too underwent a political revolution. Many generation-old rule of the family of Czars was swept away by a coup led by Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Party. This political change was presented to the world as an ideological revolution rooted in Marxism and Communism. Russia converted herself into Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) . The Ottoman Empire had to pay heavily for its friendship with the defeated Germany. She was dismembered. Sultan of Turkey, who was seen as Khalifa of the Muslim world lost this exalted position. Turkey underwent an internal revolution under the leadership of Mustafa Kamal Pasha. The very office of Khalifa was abolished . The treatment meted out to Turkey generated anti-British feelings among the Muslims at large, particularly in India, leading to the Khilafat Movement in the 1920s.
The First World War gave birth to a great institution, called the League of Nations (10 January 1920). It came into being because of the initiative and insistence of American President Woodrow Wilson. Its major objectives were to prevent wars, settle international disputes and promote international cooperation and achieve peace and security.
The League of Nation settled several minor territorial disputes. It settled the disputes between Sweeden and Finland over the Auckland Islands and between Germany and Poland over the difficult question of Upper Silesia. The League successfully intervened thrice in the disputed Balkan region. It protected Albania against attack by Yugoslavia in 1921. In 1923, it protected Greece against the possibility of aggression by Italy. Two years later, the League averted the possibility of a serious crisis between Greece and Bulgaria. Another dispute settled by the League was the boundary dispute between Turkey and Iraq in 1926.
One of the serious defects of the League of Nations was that it did not have the necessary machinery to implement its decisions. Another defect was that it had virtually allowed itself to be dominated by the European powers like England and France. Hence, it failed to maintain territorial integrity and independence of member states when disputes involved big powers. For example, it could not restrain Hitler. Nor did it succeed in stopping Italay’s aggression in Abyssinia (1935) and Japan’s in Manchuria. In fact, the League failed to achieve any major success in the political sphere and whatever success it could achieve was at the cost of smaller countries like Ethiopia and Manchuria ( 1931 ) .
However, the League achieved much in the field of social and humanitarian work. Its contribution to the process of suppression of the traffic in so men, children and children and opium and struggle against slavery and forced labour was indeed immense. It did much to promote educational cooperation and coordinate the activities of health and scientific bodies all over the world.
Within the next twenty years of the signing of a number of peace treaties after the First World War, the world was again faced with a far bigger and devastative conflict, called the Second World War. In fact, the seeds of this war lay in the very Peace Treaties like the Treaty of Versailles (1919) which were seen as unjust and discriminatory by the vanquished nations.
The German nationalism which had developed a superiority complex about the purity and antiquity of its so-called Aryan blood was smarting under the humiliating terms imposed on it under the Treaty of Versailles . The German frustration gave birth to the Personality of Adolf Hitler who created the Nazi party. The ideology of the Nazi party was a sort of fusion of German nationalism and socialism. The rising tide of German nationalism was seething with an ardent desire of revenge. The Germans readily accepted Hitler their leader and surrendered to his dictatorship.
Similarly, Benito Mussolini started a Black Shirt Movement in Italy. He called it fascism. Mussolini and the fascist party attracted many sections of society because, as he himself said, he aimed at rescuing “Italy from feeble government “. Nazism and fascism were a sort of a counterpart of the dictatorship of the proletariat (working class ) imposed upon the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin. It is something to ponder about why major portion of Europe was governed by dictatorships. It is also interesting to note that Stalin was the first European leader to enter into a peace-agreement with Hitler. May be to buy peace for some time.
Europe was divided into two camps the Allied Powers led by Great Britain and the Axis Powers led by Germany. In the early phase of the war, the Axis Powers scored sweeping victories everywhere. For a while , the British armies had to beat a hasty retreat at the battlefield of Dunkirk. For the first time Hitler carried the fury of war into the very house of England. England had always fought the wars of defence on the other’s soil and never had to suffer destruction in her own home. It was for the first time that the Germans bombed British cities, including their capital, London.
The German invasion on the Soviet Union in 1941 pushed Russia and the believers in the concept of communism all over the world into the anti –German camp. In India, Gandhi had launched Quit India Movement against the British government and all the Congress leaders were locked in jail. But the Indian Communists out of their loyalty towards the Soviet Union declared their support to the British war efforts. It was during this war that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose made a dramatic escape from British detention and reached Germany . Thereafter, he travelled to Japan in submarine. With Japan’s moral and material support he and his Indian National Army was able to liberate the island of Andaman and some part of Manipur. But with the defeat of the Axis Powers, including Japan, this valiant effort for Indian freedom could not make further headway. However, it is a thrilling chapter of India’s freedom struggle as well as the world war. It reminds us how several lakh Indians, Indians , who had settled long back in the South Asian countries filled with patriotism, contributed so generously and gallantly in terms of blood and money for the freedom of the land of their ancestors.
With the entry of the United States of America (USA) in the war and her support for the Allied Powers like England, France and the Soviet Union, the tide was turned against the axis powers Germany, Italy and Japan. USA was dragged into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour (American naval base ) on 7 December 1941. Until then, she had remained neutral, though the United States had given a massive financial aid to Britain. On 6 August, 1945, the Americans dropped an Atom Bomb on Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing nearly 84,000 people. Three days later, they dropped another atom bomb on Nagasaki, which left about 40,000 people dead. The dropping of these atomic bombs on Japan was one of the most devastating and controversial actions of the entire war.
Post War Development
Although the war had ended in favour of the Allied Powers initially led by Great Britain, she emerged out of it quite weak economically and militarily. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as two great world powers. In fact, the post-war politics got polarized between the United States and the Soviet Union. Britain, because of her internal weaknesses as well as pressure from these two super powers was not in a position to retain her hold on India . Hence, she decided to withdraw. But in the process she pushed India to the brink of a communal partition accompanied by the worst holocaust of human massacre and displacement.
The post-second World War period witnessed an era of the retreat of European colonialism. India’s independence became the precursor of the emancipation of almost all the Asian and African colonies. The League of Nations was reborn with a new name. United Nations Organisation (October,1945 ). Its seat was shifted from Geneva in Switzerland to New York in the United states of America. This change also symbolized the emergence of the USA as a super power. But she had now to contend with the Soviet Union as leader of the Communist nations. This meant a continuous Cold War between the two power blocks. (Cold war here means intense rivalries between the United States and the Soviet Union coupled with a sort of determination to avoid a full-scale and open war.) But independent India chose to carve out a path of Non-Alignment for herself. The Non-Aligned movement has been consistently trying to achieve a new world order “ free from war, poverty , intolerance and injustice “. This new order also stands for peaceful coexistence and genuine independence.
The post-1945 world witnessed several other significant developments. Some of them were the unification of Germany in October 1990 and the collapse of the USSR in December 1991. The unification of the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Western Germany was the outcome of the two major developments which took place in the German Democratic Republic in 1989. These were the changes in the leadership of the ruling Socialist Unity Party and in the government. The new leadership announced the opening of the Berlin wall which had been constructed after Germany’s partition. As far as the disintegration of the Soviet Union was concerned, it was the result of a number of factors. Some of the most important were the widespread economic and political discontent, the decade-long Russian intervention in Afghanistan and religious and ethnic strife. The immediate consequence of the disintegration of the USSR was the end of the Cold War and emergence of a unipolar world led practically by the United States of America.