topic 8.1 the origins of Western imperialism British India 1700 to 1850 in previous videos we've seen how the rapid industrialization of Western Europe combined with their already formidable global trade empire to put the other global empires of the world in a difficult position Russia China and the Ottomans all had to face the growing power of the West and either embrace it or attempt to resist building on this narrative in this video we will explore India's encounter with British economic pressure which resulted almost by accident in the complete colonization of the Indian subcontinent before we look at British intervention in India let's recap what we already know about India remember that India was governed by the Muslim Mughal Empire which had reached the greatest extent of its power in the 16th and 17th centuries under the great emperor Akbar who had adopted a policy of religious toleration and multiculturalism towards his largely Hindu subjects also remember that by the 18th century the Empire had begun to fall apart due to the abandonment of this tolerant policy now the British had been engaged in trade with the Mughal Empire since about 1600 when the British East India Company a private investment company was given permission to establish a trading post on the east coast of India by Akbar successor from this foothold the east india company along with dutch and french versions of the same thing continued to expand it to India as the Mughal Empire weakened in the wake of the collapse of Akbar successful policies in order to protect their interests against the growing unrest on the subcontinent the British East India Company created their own private armies hiring and training soldiers called see poised from among the local population as Mughal authority disintegrated the East India Company see poised gradually took control over several major Indian cities by 1757 after winning significant military victories over local Indian authorities the East India Company essentially had established political and economic control over the major city of Bengal and from this base they would continue to expand this somewhat strange dynamic in which a private foreign corporation was essentially using guns were hired to conquer foreign territory in the name of business was mostly given a pass back in Britain as long as the company continued to make profits but by the 1770s the company's success had bred an almost unimaginable amount of corruption which would soon thrust its policies in India into the public spotlight as the company began to post record losses more and more of its employees returned home to Britain with massive fortunes that apparently had been acquired illegally in 1772 the East India Company approached the British Parliament claiming bankruptcy and asking for government loans in order to stay afloat alarmed Parliament launched a full-scale investigation into the corruption of the company and began to ask serious questions about just what the obligation of the British government should be towards a private corporation by 1773 they passed a regulating act which established a series of regulations for quote the better management of the affairs of the East India Company the regulating acts made official would have been planed for some time that large portions of India were now effectively colonies of Britain it argued that the British government was the sovereign power in these Indian territories but it also authorized the East India Company to continue to govern them on behalf of the British crown with the oversight of Parliament and government agents now the exact nature of this government oversight remained unclear and there was a lot of confusion still on the ground in India over whose authority was actually sovereign the Act also forbid at East India Company employees from privately enriching themselves at the expense of the company from the base of the regulation Act of 1773 the British government steadily increased its controls over India throughout the 1770s and 1780s by 1818 the East India Company and by extension the British government controlled an empire on the Indian subcontinent with 50 times the population of the 13 North American colonies that it had lost in the American Revolution with the East India Company mostly in the driver's seat early British policy in India remained primarily economic and focus for instance the company turned india's complex land holding policies into a western-style system of private property ownership in order to make it easier for the state to collect the taxes that it used to pay administrators Sepoy soldiers and for infrastructure more and more the indian economy was geared towards agriculture mass production of crops for export like grain cotton and the opium which was proving to be so controversial in China the once thriving Indian textile industry was shut down because it competed with the growth of industrialized textile manufacturing back in England unsurprisingly the ordinary people of the Indian subcontinent seldom benefited from these changes the creation of some new jobs through the growth of internal and external trade and the expansion of farming did not balance out or really compensate for the destruction of the textile industry the East India Company enforced these changes and maintained their control over large portions of the Indian subcontinent through the power of the Sepoy armies and they work steadily disarmed the Mughal military the only direct threat to their power aside from rebellion to attempt to diminish the threat of rebellion company officials and government agents largely attempted to avoid entangling themselves in Indian social and religious customs which were complex and not very well understood by the British it's also worth noting though that they gave pretty free rein to Christian missionaries who on their own pressed for a lot of social reforms in India despite their intentions the extensive use of Sepoy soldiers combined with the british failure to understand indian religious and cultural customs to produce a massive revolution by 1857 by 1857 Sepoy soldiers the majority of whom were either Hindu or Muslim outnumbered British officers in the private armies substantially there were well over a quarter of a million seat boys compared to only about 50,000 British officers now discontent had been growing throughout the Sepoy ranks for much of the mid 19th century long serving seat boys who were mostly Hindu resented the British expectation that they would serve alongside a new recruits many of whom were from other ethnic groups and religions they also resented the promotion system in which the most experienced and loyal Indian soldiers were held back in favour of promoting British officers compounding their frustrations by 1857 British holdings in India were so large that Sepoy soldiers were expected to serve far from home in parts of the subcontinent that were largely foreign to them Antony now had to do so without the bonus pay that used to reward what they essentially saw as foreign service like with most revolutions though this discontent might have remained just discontent had not a misstep by the British ignited something far more violent in late 1856 the British determined that they would equip their armies in India with a new style of rifle which also used a new style of ammunition cartridge failing to understand that there might be any religious significance to this the British shipped new style cartridges in which the outer wrappings were sealed with beef and pork fat Sepoy soldiers had long been trained at the best way to load their rifles was by first tearing off cartridge wrappings with their teeth something that thanks to these new cartridges would force devout Hindu and Muslim soldiers to ingest beef in pork which their respective religious traditions forbade Indian soldiers were not only outraged by this but they were convinced that the British had adopted this policy to deliberately force their soldiers to break with their religious conventions they simply could not believe that sheer incompetence accounted for the new policy even though all signs point to that being exactly what happened having stumbled into exactly the sort of religious controversy that they were trying to avoid East India Company officials attempted to move rapidly to quell unrest in January of 1757 the military secretary ordered that all ammunition cartridges were to be issued free from Greece allowing the C poise to apply whatever Greece mixture seemed appropriate to them training practices were changed as well allowing soldiers to tear open cartridges with their hands rather than their teeth unfortunately for the British these two changes served nearly to confirm two Indian soldiers that their fears were true the British have been caught in an attempt to force them to break with religious custom rumors began to spread that the new cartridge wrappings were infused with beef and pork fat regardless of what official policy said by the spring of 1857 a full-fledged mutiny of Sepoy soldiers was underway and it didn't take long for other civilian groups to join the fray each with their own complaint about the changes made to their traditional ways of living by the East India Company as in the Russian Revolution of 1705 although rebellion became widespread there was a little unity or really not much of a plan among the rebels as the revolution intensified newspapers back in Britain began publishing sensationalized stories of the Sepoy treatment of the wounded women and children stories of wounded British soldiers being tortured and killed British women being raped and British children being ruthlessly slaughtered created a public appetite for revenge which found its way into the behavior of the British soldiers dispatched to put down their valiant this so-called army of retribution tortured and killed rebels in pretty horrific ways they forced them to consume beef and pork and even the blood of their deceased comrades before they strap them to cannons for execution civilians too were ruthlessly dispatched as the British Army moves through the subcontinent reestablishing control in the aftermath of the revolution which had been crushed by the spring of 1858 the British began to seriously reconsider their colonial policies a series of investigations were launched into the rumors of Sepoy misconduct towards women children and the wounded and the results indicated that although some women and children had been killed outright there was no evidence of the kind of gratuitous rape and murder that had been depicted in the British papers the government also spent considerable time attempting to understand the causes of the Revolution and reached the conclusion that I have already given to you that it had been the combined forces of religious unrest and economic frustration that had lit the fuse of rebellion a government commission concluded that a failure to understand indigenous religious traditions had led to accidental interference in both Hindu and Muslim practice it further determined that the East India Company's attempt to introduce private property and free trade had unintentionally undermined traditional Indian power structures and social hierarchies the upshot of all this was the development of a new colonial policy in India which would emphasize the preservation of Indian tradition and social hierarchies in order to allow the British to better maintain control over the colony in order to enforce this policy a new centralized government was introduced that would be totally under the control of the British back in London the East India Company was dissolved in 1858 and the last vestiges of the Mughal Empire had been dismantled by the early 1860s in their place the Raj which translates to rule was established a new Secretary of State for India oversaw colonial policy from London and a new governor-general in Delhi acted as the Viceroy on the spot the British Queen Victoria granted Indians status as her subjects in 1858 something which in theory provided them with equal protection under the law as well as religious and social freedom by 1877 she had been declared Empress of India a title which she and her successors would hold until 1948 in order to avoid the sorts of blunders that had led to the Revolution in 1857 the Raj worked to draw local Indian elites into local government something which would eventually produce a new class of Western educated bureaucrats to encourage the participation of Indians in the colonial government the British opened major western-style universities in places like Madras Calcutta and Bombay this new group Indians who have been educated in a western style will become crucial to the future of the subcontinent a further result of the implantation of the Raj was unprecedented economic expansion throughout the subcontinent the government invested significant resources in infrastructure from harbors to irrigation ditches they also created a number of massive new plantations which produced tea and cotton for export but these investments and improvements largely fail to touch the lives of most Indians who continue to live in abject and even worsening poverty the economic improvements introduced by the British were designed above all to increase the profitability of the colony and not to better the quality of life of the Indians themselves the increasing awareness of this reality that their well-being was not a priority for their colonial overlords let an increasing number of Indians to reach the conclusion that the only way to retake control of their homeland was to put aside the social and ethnic divisions which had characterized the subcontinent for so long