Negative effects on India

Once it became a colony of British colonists, India fell into the abyss of suffering. British colonial company flag from 1707 to 1801

The biggest disaster brought by colonial rule to India was the destruction of India's traditional handicraft industry. Before the middle of the 18th century, the handmade cotton textile industry was India's most "comparative advantage" industry. However, before the industrial revolution occurred at the end of the 18th century, the Indian handicraft industry, which had been brilliant in the world for thousands of years, collapsed. British colonial rule dealt a heavy blow to India's handicraft industry, causing millions of handicraftsmen to lose their source of livelihood and a large number of people died of starvation. The population of Dhaka dropped from 150,000 in the mid-18th century to 30,000 to 40,000 in 1840. "This disaster is almost unique in the history of commerce. The bones of weavers bleached the plains of India." A governor of East India once said. British colonial rule also caused famine in India. The British East India Company imposed excessive taxes in order to make money. Soon after it ruled eastern India, it nearly doubled the land tax, resulting in successive years of famine. The Bengal Famine in 1770 alone starved to death 10 million people, accounting for about 10 million people in Bengal. One-third of the population! "Between 1769 and 1770, the British created a famine by hoarding all their rice and refusing to sell it unless the price was astonishingly high." Before the arrival of Western European colonists, India had always been one of the most prosperous regions in the world. 1. After becoming a British colony, India became a "backward country" despised by Westerners. Starting from the 1860s, the East India Company began to decline. In 1813, the East India Company's trade monopoly on India was revoked. In the same year, the British government revoked its trade monopoly on China. After the East India Company's trade privileges with China were revoked, the British merchants who came to Guangzhou to trade in the Thirteenth Bank were transformed from being unified and organized by the East India Company to being individual merchants. The British government sent special officials to negotiate business matters with the Chinese government, so that the original merchants and merchants The negotiations between the two countries turned into inter-governmental negotiations, thus planting the seeds of the conflict between China and Britain. After various powers were revoked, the East India Company went bankrupt. In 1858, after the East India Company spent its entire life amassing enough wealth for Britain, it was kicked out. The East India Company was officially abolished by the British government, and the British government began to directly rule India until 1947.

The collapse of the company

The East India Company's bankruptcy was not accidental. There were three reasons for it: 1. Corruption and smuggling among company employees became common, which caused a sharp drop in the company's total revenue. 2. Due to the company’s brutal expropriation of the Indian people, the Indian people continued to revolt. And if the company wants to suppress the uprising, it will need to spend a lot of money. This creates a vicious cycle that puts the company in crisis. 3. The East India Company is the representative of commercial monopoly capital, while industrial capital has grown rapidly in Britain, and commercial capital has gradually lost its former status. This is also the main reason for the company's collapse. The East India Company's administration of India became the prototype for the British civil service. After the company's monopoly was broken in 1813, the company gradually separated from the trading business. After the Indian National Revolt in 1857, the company also handed over its management affairs to the British government, and India became a British crown colony. In the mid-1860s, all the Company's properties in India were transferred to the government. The company only helped the government in the tea trade (especially with St. Helena). The company was dissolved on January 1, 1874 after the East India Company Dividend Redemption Act came into effect. "The Times" commented: It has completed a task that no company has ever shouldered in the history of mankind, and may not shoulder in the future history. In 1987, a coffee merchant established a limited company called the East India Company, and in 1990 he applied to use the coat of arms of the original East India Company as his trademark. However, the Patent Office stated that "the company using this coat of arms cannot call itself the 'East India Company'. However, in 1996, the company set up its own website. The company still sells St. John's products under the name of the 'East India Company'." Coffee in Helena, and has published a book on the history of the East India Company. However, it is important to note that although the company claims to have been founded in 1600, it has no legal relationship with the original company.

Historical Marks

1. Expansion of the territory of the British Empire. 2. Colonial plunder and accumulation of commercial capital. 3. The strategic location refers to Afghanistan to the north, Southeast Asia to the south, and China to the east. Become a powerful strategic support point. 4. Deepen colonization and become a sales market for British industrial products, supporting the development of domestic capitalism and thus promoting the wave of colonization. 5. Crowded out other European colonial powers. 6. The rule of the East India Company accumulated experience for the direct rule and management of the future imperial government.

Evaluation of the British East India Company

The East India Company was not the same as today's multinational corporations. They all obtained the East India Company's British headquarters building from their own government and obtained trade monopoly and owned the army (including fleet), established government agencies in the colonies, and carried out brutal political rule and economic plunder on the colonies. It was a colonial institution that integrated military, political and economic activities into the slave trade and drug trade. They emerged and existed from the end of the 16th century to the first half of the 19th century, and played an important role in the primitive accumulation of capitalism in various countries. At the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century, the Portuguese, British, Dutch, Danish, French and other countries successively established the East India Company in India, Indonesia, Malaya and other places in the Eastern Hemisphere. As for why they were named "East India Company", this has something to do with Columbus mistaking America for India and spreading rumors about it. In 1492, Columbus sailed to the West Indies in today's Central America, mistook it for India, and mistook the local natives for Indians (today the Native Americans are still called Indians, which is the same as Indians in English). word). Later, people discovered that they were wrong (Columbus himself refused to admit that he was wrong until his death), but they still made the mistake and called the real India (even some Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia) "East India" and the islands in the American Caribbean as "West India" , from which the names of the above-mentioned colonial companies came. Why did the Netherlands, Britain, and France all set up the East India Company in the Eastern Hemisphere? This is because in the 17th and 18th centuries, these three countries were the main colonial powers in the world (along with Spain, but it mainly expanded in the Western Hemisphere), and they competed for control of the Eastern Hemisphere. It was particularly fierce, and the scramble to establish the East India Company was an important manifestation and means of competition between them. In the end, Britain was victorious and the British East India Company became the most famous. With the development and gradual completion of the Industrial Revolution, free competition and free trade have become the strong demands of the emerging industrial bourgeoisie. This kind of privileged company has no longer adapted to the requirements of further development of capitalism. In the mid-18th century, it was dissolved by various governments.