How was life like for the average person in the Britain Raj?

Yeah, I don't know where to put this ,but a lot of people seem to know about history here. But, how was life like for the average person in India during colonial rule. Like what would a 16, year old be doing. Could people move around freely? Did you go to school. How oppressive was it? Would the average person tell the difference between life today and then? Like would they actually notice the British leave. Etc.
 
The average Indian from about 500 B.C. to about 1990 was a peasant living in on a small subsistence farm. Over the 2490 years of the period he paid taxes to a wide variety of Empire ranging from Ashoka to the Mughals to British and probably never even met a representative of the Empire unless he had the misfortunate to get in the way of an army either as a recruit or a bystander, either way it was bad news.

As for his life well being a pasant was fairly awful with the permanent fear of famine and the routine malnutrition with any surplus being taxed from him. Tax collectorion and law and order teneded to be delagated to lcoal feudal lords or zamindars under both the Raj and earlier regiemes which was a mixed blessing. On the plus side the person oppressing you was a local, on the downside being local he could probably do a better job.
 
The average Indian from about 500 B.C. to about 1990 was a peasant living in on a small subsistence farm. Over the 2490 years of the period he paid taxes to a wide variety of Empire ranging from Ashoka to the Mughals to British and probably never even met a representative of the Empire unless he had the misfortunate to get in the way of an army either as a recruit or a bystander, either way it was bad news.

As for his life well being a pasant was fairly awful with the permanent fear of famine and the routine malnutrition with any surplus being taxed from him. Tax collectorion and law and order teneded to be delagated to lcoal feudal lords or zamindars under both the Raj and earlier regiemes which was a mixed blessing. On the plus side the person oppressing you was a local, on the downside being local he could probably do a better job.
So, was independence worth it? Don't ban me, but a common opinion I hear is that the world would be better if the colonial empires still ruled. It's not mine, but I hear it frequently on this board and I am questioning my beliefs now.
 
So, was independence worth it? Don't ban me, but a common opinion I hear is that the world would be better if the colonial empires still ruled. It's not mine, but I hear it frequently on this board and I am questioning my beliefs now.

Yes and no. On one hand India post Independence did a fairly awful job modernising and improving things. On the other hand by 1945 the British Raj had completely lost legitimacy in the eyes of those who mattered, which wasn't rural peasants but the urban middles class and Indian Armed Forces, see the various mutinies. No matter who is running Britain post war you had a choice between Mega-Algeria or Independence. The potential of Independence was largely wasted by the Indians for 50 years but Mega-Algeria would have been worse.

This being AH.com in the absence of WW2, British defeats and the wartime concessions Britain may have been able to hold on but Congress was getting stronger all the time so the clock was ticking.
 
It's worth mentioning that while life for the average Indian peasant was often pretty awful, like all such people the world across until the Industrial era, there were some very notable atrocities and famines caused by the Raj which would not necessarily have occurred under the average Indian state (literally average, obviously some would have been worse than the average and some better). Furthermore the Raj did completely stunt to growth of the classes and institutions whose counterparts in the West drove the massive increase in wealth which allowed the rural people to become vastly wealthier during and after the industrial era. So in an indirect sense the Raj was incredibly negative for the average Indian, in that it prevented the children and grandchildren of those people from enjoying the much improved lives that would have eventually come. I think in GDP per capita terms India did not "improve" from about the time the Raj got going until independence, so technically things did not get "worse" but obviously that ignores opportunity cost. The only thing the Raj did that can easily be described as good is (eventually) removing the possibility for large scale interstate war in India, similar to the Dutch in Indonesia for instance, but this is a very thin silver lining.
 
It's worth mentioning that while life for the average Indian peasant was often pretty awful, like all such people the world across until the Industrial era, there were some very notable atrocities and famines caused by the Raj which would not necessarily have occurred under the average Indian state (literally average, obviously some would have been worse than the average and some better). Furthermore the Raj did completely stunt to growth of the classes and institutions whose counterparts in the West drove the massive increase in wealth which allowed the rural people to become vastly wealthier during and after the industrial era. So in an indirect sense the Raj was incredibly negative for the average Indian, in that it prevented the children and grandchildren of those people from enjoying the much improved lives that would have eventually come. I think in GDP per capita terms India did not "improve" from about the time the Raj got going until independence, so technically things did not get "worse" but obviously that ignores opportunity cost. The only thing the Raj did that can easily be described as good is (eventually) removing the possibility for large scale interstate war in India, similar to the Dutch in Indonesia for instance, but this is a very thin silver lining.
Thank you for answering, this is very informative.
 

Yun-shuno

Banned
In the man in the high castle which I'm sure a lot of you are aware of in the DBWI in the book the British wage chemical warfare against an Indian revolt.

Honestly the colonial authorities were smart when it came to giving up the colony, I can't even imagine the amount of bloodshed in a Algeria scenario.

Probably would screw India to this day.
 
It's worth mentioning that while life for the average Indian peasant was often pretty awful, like all such people the world across until the Industrial era, there were some very notable atrocities and famines caused by the Raj which would not necessarily have occurred under the average Indian state (literally average, obviously some would have been worse than the average and some better). Furthermore the Raj did completely stunt to growth of the classes and institutions whose counterparts in the West drove the massive increase in wealth which allowed the rural people to become vastly wealthier during and after the industrial era. So in an indirect sense the Raj was incredibly negative for the average Indian, in that it prevented the children and grandchildren of those people from enjoying the much improved lives that would have eventually come. I think in GDP per capita terms India did not "improve" from about the time the Raj got going until independence, so technically things did not get "worse" but obviously that ignores opportunity cost. The only thing the Raj did that can easily be described as good is (eventually) removing the possibility for large scale interstate war in India, similar to the Dutch in Indonesia for instance, but this is a very thin silver lining.

While to an extent I agree with you on the opportunity cost point but with the very notable exception of Japan nowhere outside Europe or European settled areas expereinced the post 1750 economic takeoff of the Industrial Revolution. So while India under the Raj obviously didn't develop all that much neither did China, Southeast Asia, the Middle East etc. In fact I would argue that from the perspective of the average Indian peasant with the notable exception of the Mutiny the Raj at least delivered internal peace. Whereas the period prior the British takeover had been characterised by a series of conflicts between the declining Mughal Empire and the Maratha's which were spectacularly bloody. Now the Maratha's may in the absence of the British finally put the Mughal Empire out of it's misery and ended that conflict but it was a very decentralised polity that was mostly held together by hatred of the Mughals. So it's not difficult to imagine that in the absence of the British (or any other European power) post Mughal India could have had a very bloody 19th Century.
 
It's worth mentioning that while life for the average Indian peasant was often pretty awful, like all such people the world across until the Industrial era, there were some very notable atrocities and famines caused by the Raj which would not necessarily have occurred under the average Indian state (literally average, obviously some would have been worse than the average and some better). Furthermore the Raj did completely stunt to growth of the classes and institutions whose counterparts in the West drove the massive increase in wealth which allowed the rural people to become vastly wealthier during and after the industrial era. So in an indirect sense the Raj was incredibly negative for the average Indian, in that it prevented the children and grandchildren of those people from enjoying the much improved lives that would have eventually come. I think in GDP per capita terms India did not "improve" from about the time the Raj got going until independence, so technically things did not get "worse" but obviously that ignores opportunity cost. The only thing the Raj did that can easily be described as good is (eventually) removing the possibility for large scale interstate war in India, similar to the Dutch in Indonesia for instance, but this is a very thin silver lining.
Agreed, with the caveat that I wouldn't be so confident about describing it as a very thin silver lining. It's too easy to be cavalier about the atrocities that might have been.
 

Isaac Beach

Banned
Well I've a question to extend this discussion. I get the feeling -though I may be wrong- that the OP may have also had the urban class in mind when writing up his question. So what was it like for the average urban citizen of the Raj? In Calcutta or Delhi or Thiruvananthapuram?
 
The average Indian from about 500 B.C. to about 1990 was a peasant living in on a small subsistence farm. Over the 2490 years of the period he paid taxes to a wide variety of Empire ranging from Ashoka to the Mughals to British and probably never even met a representative of the Empire unless he had the misfortunate to get in the way of an army either as a recruit or a bystander, either way it was bad news.

As for his life well being a pasant was fairly awful with the permanent fear of famine and the routine malnutrition with any surplus being taxed from him. Tax collectorion and law and order teneded to be delagated to lcoal feudal lords or zamindars under both the Raj and earlier regiemes which was a mixed blessing. On the plus side the person oppressing you was a local, on the downside being local he could probably do a better job.

There's a good deal of cash-cropping, large amounts of crafts production, and a number of other things that would go against the idea of the great masses of peasants, waiting for civilization.
 
Well I've a question to extend this discussion. I get the feeling -though I may be wrong- that the OP may have also had the urban class in mind when writing up his question. So what was it like for the average urban citizen of the Raj? In Calcutta or Delhi or Thiruvananthapuram?

It was slight after slight from what I understand. Some castes and community groups and even some people rose above their ancestral stations had problems getting bureaucratic jobs as well as they felt the British despite near 200 years of complete domination of India still truly didn't care and they were being exploited to some end. This was felt especially by men like Gandhi who was still treated like a second class citizen after getting a British education in Law.
 
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While to an extent I agree with you on the opportunity cost point but with the very notable exception of Japan nowhere outside Europe or European settled areas expereinced the post 1750 economic takeoff of the Industrial Revolution. So while India under the Raj obviously didn't develop all that much neither did China, Southeast Asia, the Middle East etc. In fact I would argue that from the perspective of the average Indian peasant with the notable exception of the Mutiny the Raj at least delivered internal peace. Whereas the period prior the British takeover had been characterised by a series of conflicts between the declining Mughal Empire and the Maratha's which were spectacularly bloody. Now the Maratha's may in the absence of the British finally put the Mughal Empire out of it's misery and ended that conflict but it was a very decentralised polity that was mostly held together by hatred of the Mughals. So it's not difficult to imagine that in the absence of the British (or any other European power) post Mughal India could have had a very bloody 19th Century.

It's not particularly useful to compare South Asia to East Asia in this time, as South Asia had been subject to European influence for a significantly longer period of time. Parts of the Middle East, on the other hand, was doing reasonably well on a per capita basis when compared to South and East Asia, at least until WW1. I'm no expert, but going off what the Indian states were getting up to just prior to the 7 years war and British hegemony they appeared to have been much further along the "westernisation" path than nations far to the east. There were of course still some major obstacles for them in achieving that economic takeoff, and I have no doubt that if they achieved it it would still be well after the Europeans, but from the perspective of 2016 if India, or more likely parts of India, had begun really developing economically in the 1930's or 40's as opposed to the 90's, today would be a radically better place for those people living in India.

You're right that there probably would have been more and bloodier wars during the 19th century, and given this is ah.com we could easily enough devise a scenario that was objectively worse than India under the Raj if we wanted, but I would still argue that short of some truly extreme conflicts, as in Taiping rebellion level conflicts, trends in India prior to British hegemony and in the world generally during the 19th century are reasonably likely to lead to a slow but steady economic improvement during that time, and would plant the seeds for properly transformative growth in the 20th. It's entirely subjective whether "Reasonably peaceful India with extreme poverty up until today" is better or worse than "Bloodier India with earlier economic development", and to be sure it's much easier to lean towards the latter in 2016 than it would be in say 1900. Ultimately I think that while the Raj was not the worst of all worlds, it was strongly deficient in a number of ways that are unlikely to have been similarly replicated under a native regime.

Agreed, with the caveat that I wouldn't be so confident about describing it as a very thin silver lining. It's too easy to be cavalier about the atrocities that might have been.

I only call it thin due to it coming quite late during British hegemony i.e. post-Mutiny, and the fact that it included some very nasty famines and ended in the Indo-Pakistani split and that massive movement of people. In principle establishing a peaceful hegemony is a very good thing for ordinary people if it removes war, but the British did so in a very clumsy and exploitative way.
 
While to an extent I agree with you on the opportunity cost point but with the very notable exception of Japan nowhere outside Europe or European settled areas expereinced the post 1750 economic takeoff of the Industrial Revolution.
There is academic consensus that while India's economy would probably have suffered significantly before the sheer industrial might of the West even without colonization, colonial rule made India particularly worse off. I'll quote an earlier post of mine, adding some emphasis on the way to highlight how the "normal" economic shock of industrial-level imports was exacerbated by the British:

On how British rule "knocked the stuffing out" of India's economy and turned artisans and merchants into peasants, see "Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c.1720-1860," p. 79-80:
[E]specially between the 1820s and 1850s, British rule restructured South Asian society and economy in ways meant to serve its own interests and which had the consequence of all but permanently precluding the transformation to modern industrialization. It was in this era that many of the social and economic features, understood by later generations to be the products of changeless tradition and taken by them to constitute the barriers of 'backwardness' to development, can be seen to have crystallized. Recent research has given particular attention to the nature and implications of the long-term price depression which descended on the South Asian economy toward the ends of the 1820s [...] In South Asia, it was exacerbated by three factors which can be directly associated with colonial rule: the export of large quantities of specie to service the China trade; the dismantling of many indigenous court, military, and religious centres, which had provided the main foci of internal demand, and the impact of Lancashire on South Asia's previous overseas and luxury textile markets. The depression, and these particular causes of it, can be seen as having knocked the stuffing out of a large part of South Asia's 'ancien regime' mercantile capitalist economy. Moreover, much of what was left was now taken out of the hands of the indigenous capitalists and passed, via the monopoly powers of the state, to British ones. [...] The principal process of economic change during these years has been described as "peasantization." Displaced soldiers, courtisans, priests and artisans found their way onto the land, which was fast becoming the only available base of subsistence.​

On the impact of the British on South India's textile economy, "South India 1770-1840: The Colonial Transition", page 507-509, addressing your point directly:
While 'local' resistance may have kept Utilitarianism and Evangelicalism at arm's length, it could not do the same for the impact of Britain's Industrial Revolution. South India's overseas textile markets collapsed, staunching vital inflows of specie and precipitating a general price collapse which was to last for a generation. [...] Markets atrophied and a long depression sapped commercial vitality. By the time that the depression lifted, in the 1850s, what once had been one of the early modern world's great commercial economies had been turned into a 'backward' agricultural dependency.

How far the fact that South India was under colonial/Company rule directly contributed to this outcome remains a debatable question. The global impact of the British Industrial Revolution - which drastically reduced commodity prices - affected most of the world similarly, whether it was 'colonized' or not. While what might have happened had the supposedly 'modernizing' Mysore state of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan defeated the English in 1782 remains one of the teasing counterfactuals of Southern history, it is difficult to think that it could have made much difference by the late nineteeenth century. A 'reactively-modernizing' Mysore must surely have gone the same way as Mohammed Ali's Egypt and the China of the [Tongzhi] Restoration before the West's industrial power.

But in two ways, perhaps, it was important for South India and the wider world that an archaic form of colonial/Company rule was already established before British industrial supremacy became manifest
- and ways which re-open questions on the transition(s) of the eighteenth century. In the first place, it guaranteed that the depression would be deep and prolonged and that many of its possible outcomes would be foreclosed. The Company's 'victory' did not only eliminate forces of competition in the market but, as Christopher Bayly argued, also forces of internal consumption and demand. As princely armies were cut back and elite supply trimmed, domestic markets tended to contract - promoting de-urbanization and de-industrialization. Further problems were created by the tendency of the Company to export specie to China and deplete an already constricted money supply.

Added to this, both the mercantilist and the historicist bases of the Company state combined to create a situation in which 'profit' would be sought much more readily through the pursuit of 'rent' than through the expansion of production. With the revenue system dominating the economy, energies were turned away from productive investment (which might attract penal taxation).
On how the Industrial Revolution made India a "colonial economy" which the EIC did nothing to stop, A Concise History of Modern India, page 76-77
By 1815 Indian textiles and other artisanal commodities could no longer compete with Britain, or on the world market, with British machine-made goods. Within a few years British textiles began to penetrate the Indian market, initiating the development of a classically 'colonial' economy, importing manufactures and exporting raw materials, that was to last for a century, until the 1920s. [...] Although new opportunities for commercial agriculture brought advantage for some, the loss of overseas markets was devastating, especially for skilled weavers in the great weaving centres, such as Dacca and Murshidabad. In the countryside weavers managed to survive by taking advantage of cheap imported thread, but those who had relied on hand spinning for subsistence were often driven back into agriculture. At the same time the rapid decline in the number of Indian courts, lavish spenders on luxury goods and armaments, reduced demand for many commodities. The disbandment of these courts also forced on to the land large numbers of former militiamen and retainers, which in turn further adversely affected artisanal production.

[...] The East India Company during the early decades of the nineteenth century did little to set India on a path of economic growth [...] This 'drain' of wealth was complemented by the Company's withdrawal of funds to cover what it called the 'Home Charges,' including pensions, debt service, and the cost of maintaining the Company's offices. [...] The situation was exacerbated by the Company's forces of deflationary finance, as it sought to trim its budget deficits. Throughout, the heaviest burden India had to bear was that of the land revenue demand. Essential to the support of the army and the administration, these payments, rigorously collected in cash, lay at the heart of the British impact upon the Indian countryside.
From India: A History, which also supports the theory that British rule drained India's economy, page 390-391:
Yet such was this superstructure of agents and rentiers, and such the extractive culture of the revenue system, that profits rarely found their way back into production other than as advances on the next crop. The actual cultivator thus became, if anything, even more indebted. Commercialisation only "led to differentiation without genuine growth." In effect India’s rural economy was already experiencing the down-side of plantation economics, in terms of labour exploitation, without the usual up-side of capital investment. "The point is not that so many peasants suffered (they would have suffered under capitalist modernisation, too) but that they suffered for nothing."

The British preferred to emphasise their investment in infrastructure, especially railways and irrigation works ("trains and drains"). They also pointed to the country’s generally favourable balance of payments. Critics, though, were less impressed by India’s theoretical prosperity and more exercised by Indians' actual poverty. As early as 1866 Dadabhai Naoroji, the future "Grand Old Man of Congress," had begun to wonder whom the trains actually benefited and whither the drains actually led. In fact he developed a "drain theory" which, with ramifications provided by his successors, would run like an undercurrent throughout the nationalist debate.

This ‘drain theory’ maintained that India’s surplus, instead of being invested so as to create the modernised and industrialised economy needed to support a growing population, was being drained away by the ruling power. The main drain emptied in London with a flood of what the government called "home charges." These included salaries and pensions for government and army officers, military purchases, India Office overheads, debt servicing, and the guaranteed interest payable to private investors in India’s railways. Calculated in sterling at an increasingly unfavourable rate of exchange, they came to something like a quarter of the government of India’s total revenue. With much of what remained being squandered on administrative extravagances and military adventures in Burma and Afghanistan, it was not surprising that Indians lived in such abject poverty or that famines were so frequent.

The theory also included an analysis of how the drain actually worked. The Secretary of State for India in London obtained sterling to meet his ‘home charges’ by selling bills of exchange to British importers. Presented in India, these bills could be converted into rupees out of government revenues and so used for the purchase of Indian produce. The private sector therefore played an important part in the drain since its exports from India constituted the drain’s flow. By the same token the export surplus was of little economic benefit to Indians; and worse still, since they consisted mostly of raw materials, exports gave no encouragement to India’s industrialisation. The classic case was cotton. In the days of the Company, British purchases had been mainly of finished piece-goods. Latterly, with Lancashire’s mills underselling India’s handloom weavers, British purchases switched to raw cotton and yarn. Now, when new and often Indian-owned mills in Bombay were at last in a position to compete, they were repeatedly frustrated by tariff policies which favoured British imports and by regulations which handicapped Indian production.

India’s embryonic industries – principally jute, cotton, coir and coal – needed protection; the British insisted on free trade. Their laissez faire attitudes extended even to the land revenue, where rising prices meant that fixed revenue assessments actually became somewhat less onerous during the latter half of the nineteenth century. But rather than adjust such assessments the government now preferred to explore other sources of revenue, like introducing an income tax.​
 
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