ABSTRACT
N ehru was born in 1889, an Indian baby but a citizen of the British em pire and a colonial subject of Q ueen Victoria. This was a time before imperial rulers suffered serious self-doubt about their role, a time when Britain seemed quite evidently the strongest world power. Yet British rule in India, the raj,1 was a comparatively recent phenom enon in the time-scale of India’s own history. Recorded civilisation on the subcontinent stretched back over 4000 years; and in the m ore recent past India had developed sophisticated state-systems in the form of empires and small regional states at least contem porary with the em erging states of early m odern Europe. W hen English traders first ventured into Indian waters and settled in tiny num bers in small coastal ‘factories’ in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries they operated on Asian terms, as one of many international groups involved in the spice and textile trades. Only in the later eighteenth century did the m en of the East India Company begin to exercise political control, by acquiring from Indians rights to gather land rev enue. This revenue became the financial foundation of an in creasingly powerful EIC government, backed by a large standing army, which controlled the whole subcontinent by the 1820s. The upheavals across north India in 1857 brought to an end Company raj, and India came directly under the control of the British Crown and parliament. (The great Indian territorial
sway of the British sovereign was recorded in Latin on British domestic coinage until 1947.)
However, British politicians and parliam entarians were not in any simple sense land-hungry, despite the vast areas which came to be coloured pink on political maps of the world. Their preference was for less expensive means of furthering British interests globally, and they were deeply suspicious of direct governance in places where there was no large-scale white settle m ent. But when N ehru was born virtually all British opinion was agreed that the raj was an inescapable fact of British life, a special case for direct imperial control because it was uniquely vital to Britain’s world-wide position. A century later the im port ance of India to Britain is less easy to com prehend. India was the hom e of the Indian army, a huge imperial reserve of fight ing power num bering well over 100,000 Indian troops, paid for by Indian tax-payers. It was often deployed in many different parts of the em pire for imperial purposes as well as defending India’s own borders, particularly the north-western land fron tier, the ‘back gate’ of im perial Russia. India was also highly significant for British trade and investment. Towards the end of the century nearly one-fifth of British overseas investment was in India. The subcontinent was the largest single m arket for British exports, mostly m anufactured goods ranging from soap, books and textiles to railway locomotives and carriages. India exported raw materials such as cotton and ju te , and of course tea, to Britain, Europe, North America and South-East Asia, not only supplying British domestic needs but also by exporting to o ther areas helping Britain to balance her trading books world-wide. India’s public finance and the exchange rate of the rupee were m anaged in the im perial interest, thus sup porting sterling as a strong international currency. Beyond this, in more personal terms, India also provided a small but signific ant area for the employment of expatriates, mostly from Brit a in’s professional classes, in her administration, army, police, forestry and medical services, education, and in the Christian church, as chaplains and missionaries. Early in the twentieth century there were about 150,000 Europeans in India, of whom over one-third were women. Few of these were perm anent set tlers, because of the climate and the nature of their work: most re turned to live out their old age in Britain in m odest comfort.
