ABSTRACT
Nehru was born in 1889, an Indian baby but a citizen of the British empire and a colonial subject of Queen 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 phenomenon in the time-scale of India’s own history. Recorded civilisation on the subcontinent stretched back over 4000 years; and in the more recent past India had developed sophisticated state-systems in the form of empires and small regional states at least contemporary with the emerging states of early modern Europe. When English traders first ventured into Indian waters and settled in tiny numbers 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 men of the East India Company begin to exercise political control, by acquiring from Indians rights to gather land revenue. This revenue became the financial foundation of an increasingly 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.)
