At the start of the 20th century, the map of the world looked like this. These colours are Europe's colonial empires. France had possessions across Africa and in China. Italy was an East Africa and Libya, and the Dutch were in what is today in Dinesia. By far the biggest empire, however, belonged to Britain, and the jewel in its crown was the Indian subcontinent. People talk a lot about Britain's colonial legacy, and mother was really so bad. Given the importance of British India for the empire, it's the best place to start if you want an answer to that. It's important to say that the Indian subcontinent at that time in the Mughal Empire wasn't conquered by Britain, but rather a British corporation. Its name was the East India Company. The Mughal Empire of the 18th century was politically volatile, but also immensely wealthy. According to economic historian Angus Madison, it shared the world economy in 1700 was 23%. Pretty much the same as the whole of Europe combined, all the United States today. Although the East India Company started life in the early 1600s, it was only a century later after the sack of Delhi by the Persian king Nadashar that the Mughal Empire effectively collapsed. That created the political vacuum with war and principalities and factions becoming increasingly distrustful of one another. For the East India Company, this presented a major opportunity, an 1757 Robert Clive, who came to be known as Clive of India, won the Battle of Placid. Eight years later, in 1765, Shah Alam issued an edict that revenue officials be replaced by those of the company. A private corporation, with its own army, now controlled with the largest and wealthiest states on earth. Over the following century, the area they controlled significantly expanded. That was until the Indian Mutant of 1857, at which point the British government administered the country instead, things would remain that way until India gained independence in 1947. Some balance. Over those two centuries, the Britain made any positive contribution to India by making it a part of the British Empire. We look back on that period now as just awful, don't we? I think there were some good bits and there were some less than good bits. You look at the fact that we introduced parliamentary democracy to a lot of countries, the sort of civil service system of government which all of these countries, all a lot of these countries are still using today. The British put in a system that actually brought about due to education, that actually brought about partial emancipation of women, that actually brought about democracy, that it made India where it is today. It's time to stop seeing empires of dirty word. First, let's talk about the economy. When Clive triumphed to the Battle of Placid, the Mughal Empire comprised around 23% of the world economy. By 1947, as the British withdrew, that figure had fallen to 4%. The reason why was that in the intervening 200 years, the industrialisation of Britain had come to depend on the de-industrialisation of South Asia. Take textile manufacturers one example. In the early 18th century, India enjoyed a 25% share of the global trading textiles. But by 1834, Lord Benedict declared that the bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India. Meanwhile, exports to British textiles to India sold, with a billion yards entering the latter each year after 1870. Things were so bad that by 1896, India produced only 8% of the cloth consumed domestically, meaning it had gone from exporting powerhouse to serving a tiny portion of domestic demand. It wasn't an accident that Britain began the workshop for the world, starting with cotton manufacturers, something which would have been impossible without force. Indeed, according to one economist, Britain took around 45 trillion out of India between 1765 and 1938. That's 14.5 times the size of the British economy today. This primarily happened to trade. Prior to the 18th century, Britain bought things from Indian producers and would pay for them with precious metals generally silver. But this changed after 1765 when the East India Company established a monopoly over Indian trade. They then began collecting India using a portion of those revenues typically a third to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods, British traders acquired them for free. Some of these essentially stolen goods were consumed in Britain while the rest were exported elsewhere. This allowed Britain to finance a flood imports from Europe, including the Seros like Iron, Tahr and Timber, which were critical for you guessed it, Britain's industrial revolution. But India's exploitation wasn't merely limited to economics and resources. By the late 19th century, two thirds of the British Empire's Standing Army was paid for by Indian taxes. By 1922, around two thirds of the Indian government's revenues paid for British Indian troops abroad. Indians weren't just paying for their own subjugation, but that of others too. But India also paid in blood, with over 1 million Indian troops serving during the First World War, suffering an estimated 74,000 casualties, a statistic which is generally neglected. Then there was the Second World War, which Britain joined, in order to defend the sovereignty of Poland. Yet it did so while maintaining an empire. What is more, it was India that contributed the largest number of soldiers to British imperial forces, raising the largest volunteer force in history, around 2.5 million men by 1945. Meanwhile, the country's elected political leadership, the Congress Party, was in prison. 87,000 soldiers from the Indian Empire lost their lives fighting for democracy, and yet the very politicians they elected were in prison. Some British officers were honest about the scale of British India's contribution, with Field Marshal Sir Claude Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army admitting that the British couldn't have come through both World War 1 and 2 if they hadn't had the Indian Army. Indeed, in its darkest hour, Britain relied on India to get through something forgotten today when people said it stood alone. Finally, there's famine, with around 30 million people dying as a result of slavation under British rule. Now, you could put that down to a natural disaster, but the grim truth is that the overwhelming majority of those deaths, with the result of political choices, made by the British. Indeed, when it came to famine, just as in Ireland in the 1840s and 50s, British policy was in action. Firstly, because intervention was viewed as undermining free trade, secondly, because of concerns about overpopulation, and finally, well, they just didn't want to spend money. The point of empire was that it was a cash cow. This wasn't a secret. Indeed, when Sir Richard Temple imported rice during the Eurissa Famine of 1866, the Economist magazine, yes, that one, attacking for lying Indians to think is the duty of the government to keep them alive. That was the position of the British government too. In British India, people were allowed to start the death as a point of ideology, and all in the name of the free market. That's no difference to force collectivisations that killed millions during the 20th century. Unsurprisingly, the last famine on the Indian subcontinent was in 1943, surely before the British departed. That was the Bengal famine. When Winston Churchill deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to British soldiers and to top up European stoppals. According to Churchill, the starvation of any way underfed Bengalis was less serious, and as deaths began to pile up, he planned it on the Indians themselves for breeding like rabbits. When the East India company was established, the Mughal Empire presided over the world's largest economy with one of its most sophisticated cultures. At that point India had literacy rates and a life expectancy on a par with Europe. When Britain departed the subcontinent in 1947 by contrast, it left the society with 16% literacy, a life expectancy of 31, and 90% of people living below the poverty line. Compare that to Japan, which achieved 90% literacy after the major restoration, and rapid development during the late 19th century. The key difference, of course, is that Japan was never colonized. Yet, despite all of this, a pull by Yuga in 2020 found that only 17% of the British think the countries Britain colonized were worse off as a result. With almost twice as many thinking they benefited. It's one thing to say Britain's empire is in the past, but it's quite another to insist that imposing poverty and starvation on hundreds of millions of people was actually good for them. It brought order, security, education, and democracy to much of the world. When asked whether the empire was something to be proud or ashamed of, 32% claimed to feel proud of the empire, or 19% were ashamed. Personally speaking, I don't feel ashamed for things I haven't done, but pride in what exactly? Thief, starvation, mass murder. The only way to make sense of such findings is to accept that even today, people don't know the truth about the British empire and how gruesome it really was. Given recent calls from politicians that we should learn about our history rather than seek to erase it, all I can say is, I couldn't agree more. Let's start by teaching the truth about the British empire, and how it's one of the world's wealthiest countries, and turn it into one of the poorest. If you enjoyed this video, there are two things you can do to won't cost you a thing. Like this video and subscribe for the NVIDIA YouTube channel. If you want to see more like it, help us build a new media for a different politics. Go to NVIDIA.com forward slash support.