Colonial India was the part of the Indian subcontinent that was occupied by European colonial powers during the Age of Discovery. European power was exerted both by conquest and trade, especially in spices.[1][2]
The search for the wealth and prosperity of India led to the colonisation of the Americas after
Trading rivalries among the seafaring European powers brought other coastal powers from the empires of Europe to India. The
third battle of Panipat
, many relatively weak and unstable Indian states which emerged were increasingly open to manipulation by the Europeans, through dependent Indian rulers.
In the later 18th century, Great Britain and France struggled for dominance, partly through proxy Indian rulers but also by direct military intervention. The defeat of the formidable Indian ruler
Travancore-Dutch War. The Dutch never recovered from the defeat and no longer posed a large colonial threat to India.[21][22]
Ceylon was lost at the Congress of Vienna in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, where the Dutch having fallen subject to France, saw their colonies captured by Britain. The Dutch later became less involved in India, as they had the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).
joint-stock companies to finance the voyages: the English (later British) East India Company, and the Dutch East India Company, were chartered in 1600 and 1602 respectively. These companies were intended to carry on the lucrative spice trade, and they focused their efforts on the areas of production, especially the Indonesian archipelago the "Spice Islands", and on India as an important market for the trade. The close proximity of London and Amsterdam across the North Sea, and the intense rivalry between England and the Netherlands, inevitably led to conflict between the two companies, with the Dutch gaining the upper hand in the Moluccas (previously a Portuguese stronghold) after the withdrawal of the English in 1622, but with the English enjoying more success in India, at Surat, after the establishment of a factory
Jagat Seth and some others secretly working with the British, asked for their support to overthrow the Nawab in return for trade grants. The British forces, whose sole duty until then was guarding Company property,[citation needed] were numerically inferior to the Bengali armed forces. At the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757, fought between the British under the command of Robert Clive and the Nawab, Mir Jafar's forces betrayed the Nawab and helped them to defeat him. Jafar was installed on the throne as a British subservient ruler.[24]
The battle transformed British perspective as they realised their strength and potential to conquer smaller Indian kingdoms and marked the beginning of the imperial or colonial era in South Asia.
British policy in Asia during the 19th century was chiefly concerned with expanding and protecting its hold on India, viewed as its most important colony and the key to the rest of Asia.[27] The East India Company drove the expansion of the British Empire in Asia. The company's army had first joined forces with the Royal Navy during the Seven Years' War, and the two continued to cooperate in arenas outside India: against the French campaign in Egypt and Syria, the capture of Java from the Netherlands in 1811, the acquisition of Singapore in 1819 and Malacca in 1824, and the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1826.[28]
From its base in India, the company was also engaged in an increasingly profitable opium trade to China, which had begun in the 1730s. This trade helped reverse the trade imbalances resulting from British imports of tea, which saw large outflows of silver from Britain to China. The Chinese authorities banned the importation of opium, and in 1839, 20,000 chests of opium were confiscated and destroyed in Canton by Lin Zexu. This led to the First Opium War, which was concluded in the Treaty of Nanjing, re-legalizing the importation of opium into China.[29]
The British had direct or indirect control over all parts of present-day India before the middle of the 19th century. In 1857, a local rebellion by a group of
India suffered a series of crop failures in the late 19th century, leading to widespread famines that caused tens of millions of deaths in India.[34] Responding to earlier famines as threats to the stability of their control, the East India Company had already begun to concern itself with famine prevention during the early colonial period.[35] This greatly expanded during the Raj, in which commissions were set up after each famine to investigate the causes and implement new policies, which took until the early 1900s to take an effect.[36]
The slow but momentous reform movement developed gradually into the
differed from Gandhi in their use of violence during their campaigns against British rule. The independence movement attained its objective with the independence of Pakistan and India on 14 and 15 August 1947 respectively.
Calicut, Kerala (1752) and the Nicobar Islands (1750s). At one time, the main Danish and Swedish East Asia companies together imported more tea to Europe than the British did. Their outposts lost economic and strategic importance, and Tranquebar, the last Dano-Norwegian outpost, was sold to the British on 16 October 1868.[citation needed
Austrian colonisation of the Nicobar Islands (German: Nikobaren, renamed to the Theresia Islands [Theresia-Inseln]) involved a series of three separate attempts to colonize and settle the Nicobar Islands by the Habsburg monarchy, and later the Austrian Empire, between 1778 and 1886. During the period of Austrian colonisation, the Nicobar Islands were previously colonized by the Danish in 1756, but were abandoned due to multiple outbreaks of malaria.[39]
. The ultimate goal of the Portuguese, as with the nations that followed them, was to reach the source of the fabled holy trinity of spices ... while seizing the vital centers of international trade routes, thus destroying the long-standing Muslim control of the spice trade. European colonisation of Asia was ancillary to this purpose.
. What drove men to such extraordinary feats ... gold and silver in easy abundance ... and, perhaps more especially, merchandise that was altogether unavailable in Europe—strange jewels, orient pearls, rich textiles, and animal and vegetable products of equatorial provenance ... The ultimate goal was to obtain supplies of spices at source and then to meet demand from whatever quarter.
served as India's delegates to the London Commonwealth Meeting, April 1945, and the U.N. San Francisco Conference on International Organisation, April–June 1945."
. Partition of colonial India in 1947 – forming two nation-states, India and Pakistan, at the time of its independence from almost two centuries of British rule – was a deeply violent and gendered experience.
. In this introductory section I want to touch briefly on four aspects of this social and historic context for a reading of Sunlight on a Broken Column: the struggle for independence; communalism and the partition of colonial India into independent India and East and West Pakistan; the social structure of India; and the specific situation of women.
. Partition was intended to create a homeland for Indian Muslims, but this was far from the case; Indian Muslims are not only divided into three separate sections, but the number of Muslims in India--for whom the Muslim homeland was meant--still remains the highest of all three sections.
Riddick, John F. The History of British India: A Chronology (2006) excerpt
Riddick, John F. Who Was Who in British India (1998); 5000 entries excerpt
Further reading
Andrada (undated). The Life of Dom John de Castro: The Fourth Vice Roy of India. Jacinto Freire de Andrada. Translated into English by Peter Wyche. (1664). Henry Herrington, New Exchange, London. Facsimile edition (1994) AES Reprint, New Delhi.