Quotes About Colonialism

India's share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

By the early 1800s, India had been reduced from a land of artisans, traders, warriors and merchants, functioning in thriving and complex commercial networks, into an agrarian society of peasants and moneylenders.

In August 1765, the young and weakened Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, was browbeaten into issuing a diwani that replaced his own revenue officials in the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa with the Company's. An international corporation with its own private army and princes paying deference to it had now officially become a revenue-collecting enterprise. India would never be the same again.

historian William Dalrymple quotes a Mughal official named Narayan Singh as asking after 1765, 'when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?

The British ruled nineteenth-century India with unshakeable self-confidence, buttressed by protocol, alcohol and a lot of gall.

The soldiers of the East India Company obliged, systematically smashing the looms of some Bengali weavers and, according to at least one contemporary account (as well as widespread, if unverifiable, belief), breaking their thumbs so they could not ply their craft.

And the British had the gall to call him 'Clive of India', as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that a good portion of the country belonged to him.

The British in India were never more than 0.05  per  cent of the population.

I, for one, dearly hope that a British prime minister will find the heart, and the spirit, to get on his or her knees at Jallianwala Bagh in 2019 and beg forgiveness from Indians in the name of his or her people for the unforgivable massacre

William Digby calculated that 'the ryots in the Districts outside the permanent settlement get only one half as much to eat in the year as their grandfathers did, and only one-third as much as their great-grandfathers did. Yet, in spite of such facts, the land tax is exacted with the greatest stringency and must be paid to the Government in coin before the crops are garnered!

When an Englishman wants something, he never publicly admits to his wanting it; instead, his want is expressed as a 'burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants

It is a bit rich for the Brits to suppress, exploit, imprison, torture and maim a people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it. We weren't given democracy, we had to snatch it from your hands

British under Clive defeat Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula to become rulers of Bengal, the richest province of India.

But in two hundred years of British rule, and thousands of cases in which Indians died at the hands of their colonial masters, these three cases were the only exceptions.

the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India's share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent.

had exported an average of £13,000,000 worth of goods to Britain each year from 1835 to 1872 with no corresponding return of money; in fact, payments to people residing in Britain, whether profits to Company shareholders, dividends to railway investors or pensions to retired officials, made up a loss of £30 million a year.

Agricultural taxes amounted at a minimum to half the gross produce and often more, leaving the cultivator less food than he needed to support himself and his family; British estimates conceded that taxation was two or three times higher than it had ever been under non-British rule, and unarguably higher than in any other country in the world.

The extensive and detailed calculations of William Digby, the British writer, pointed to the diminishing prosperity of the Indian people and the systematic expropriation of India's wealth by Britain—including the telling fact that the salary of the Secretary of State for India in 1901, paid for by Indian taxes, was equivalent to the average annual income of 90,000 Indians.

the Bengali intellectual and author of the bestselling Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), with its cringe-worthy dedication to the British empire in India: To

If God really loved Indians, he would have made us white people.

Shoving hot bread up a roasting bird's ass & feasting on it seems like an apt celebration of colonialism.

Homer had transformed a lying colonial asshole into one of the most admired literary figures in human history. So, Corliss asked, what lessons could we learn from Homer? To be considered epic, one needed only to employ an epic biographer.

If any Englishman dedicated his life to securing the freedom of India, resisting tyranny and serving the land, I should welcome that Englishman as an Indian.

To those new States whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny