383
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
383 points (95.9% liked)
History Memes
3255 readers
915 users here now
A place to share history memes!
Rules:
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, assorted bigotry, etc.
-
No fascism, atrocity denial or apologia, etc.
-
Tag NSFW pics as NSFW.
-
Follow all Lemmy.world rules.
Banner courtesy of @setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Can we get context for the "having all its wealth drained" bit?
as an Indian, I have heard people around me say, britishers looted all of our riches, the riches being gold from the western, central, southern kingdoms in both late 18th century and throughout 19th century; we had high taxes imposed and east india company had trade monopoly, then in 20th century the taxation was getting out of hand and a lot of indians were becoming slaves at indigo plantations, then slowly came the revolution and in mid 20th century wwII, some indians got control of our iron and coal mines, tata's and birla and I forgot, our mills and by now we had some educated-literate folks which led the revolution...
if you go on Instagram for a while and scroll, you'd eventually find some content with indians in the comment section blowing up about our past glory and ancient hinduism and what not. We lowkey still have tons of uneducated idiots
Taxes in India were significantly increased by Britain during the war, almost tripling if memory serves. India was still quite impoverished at this time, so it's no exaggeration to say that this imposition represented a massive extraction of wealth from India.
Not to mention the Bengal famine of 1943, which is apparently due to Churchill diverting the food resources to the soldiers, starving the population: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
I did a deep dive on that a few years ago. The claim that food was diverted from india comes from a single book written by a guy whose entire career is based on that book. And there is no actual documentation to show that any food was actually diverted, the closest you can get is that food shipments from Australia heading towards the med went close to India.
Short answer - British
Long answer - Colonisation by the British
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4
It's not too long (15 minutes), but it's a very good speech about the economic situation in India before and after British colonization.