A Great Robbery That Shook the Raj

[Shivaji.Dasgupta]

Though British people always give example of their Ethical and lawful code of conduct but we need to remember that they are the one who introduces modern day unethical practices on the battlefield.
Whether it's battle of palasy, battle of jhanshi, Shrirangapattanam or Arrah. The treachery is most famous game of Brits.
Burning alive the child daughter of tantya tope to extract his whereabouts is no way an ethical way of act. And there were N no. Of such incidents. Their atrocities were not properly accounted and documented in India otherwise we may have several books on this particular topic.

[timmy]

A short time ago, I finished William Dalrymple's The Anarchy - The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of and Empire. As someone who enjoys aspects of naval history and different kinds of ships, along with their development, I thought about Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, with rows of battleships that were miles long. As the most technically developed fighting system of the day, they were quite expensive, and I wondered how the British, more than any other nation, was able to afford such a huge number of very expensive ships.

It was also a puzzle to me, how India went from being the wealthiest country/kingdom/empire in the world in Aurangzeb's time, highly developed in various sciences and with great learning and cultural sophistication, to being a byword for poverty and backwardness, even in the days of my youth. How would a nation, I wonder, go from being a breadbasket in Bengal, to suffering several severe famines that killed millions under British rule?

Dalraymple's book laid out the history and causes for such things to me, and also provides many lessons for our time.

The British East India Company, at the beginning, would be very deferential in their dealings, but once their foot was in the door, they exploited every trick in the book to establish power which ended up exceeding that of most nations of the world at the time. it is clear that no nation or people will suffer the loss of freedom, culture, and wealth willingly, and that many methods must be used to accomplish this, many of which would be quite unsavory and all of which would be dressed up in some sort of rubbish to convince people that it was all a big favor.

Sujay, I can't say where your file went. It will need to be something that is posted on the web someplace for the bulletin board application to grab it and present it here. Your description does sound interesting!