40 years history of British colonialism, the massacre of 100 million Indians.
Professor of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and member of the Royal Society of Arts, and “Dylan Sullivan”, a master’s student in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, in an article examined the mortality statistics of Indians during the British colonial period between 1880 and 1920. .
The translation of the full text of this article follows:
Recent years have seen a renewed nostalgia for the British Empire. Important books such as How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson and The Last Imperialist by Bruce Gilley have argued that British colonialism brought prosperity and development to India and other colonies. Two years ago, a poll by YouGov found that 32 percent of Britons were actively proud of the country’s colonial history.
This beautiful picture of colonialism is dramatically at odds with the historical record. According to economic historian Robert C. Allen, extreme poverty in British-ruled India rose from 23 percent in 1810 to more than 50 percent in the middle of the 20th century. Real wages in India fell during the British colonial period, reaching their lowest levels in the 19th century, while famines became more frequent and deadly. Colonialism in India not only did not benefit the people of this country, but it was recorded as a human tragedy in history.
Experts agree that the period 1880 to 1920—the height of British imperial power—was particularly devastating for India. Comprehensive population censuses conducted by the colonial regime in the 1880s show that the death rate increased significantly during this period, from 37.2 deaths per thousand inhabitants in the 1880s to 44.2 deaths. per thousand people in the 1910s. Life expectancy in India also decreased from 26.7 years to 21.9 years during these years.
A recent article in the Journal of World Development used census data to estimate how many people were killed by British imperial policies during these four brutal decades. If we use this data as a basis for “normal” mortality, we find that about 50 million excess deaths occurred under British colonial India in the period 1891-1920.
