Growth of Trade and Railways to Help Britain

These analysts exposed the force of British arguments that the growth of foreign trade and railways implied development for India. They pointed out that the pattern of foreign trade was unfavourable to India. It relegated India to a position of importer of finished goods and exporter of raw materials and foodstuffs. The development of railways, they argued, was not coordinated with India’s industrial needs and it ushered in a commercial rather than an industrial revolution. The net

Views

‘India Reform Tract’ II, p. 3, says: ‘It is an exhausting drain upon the resources of the country, the issue of which is replaced by no reflex; it is an extraction of the life blood from the veins of national industry which no subsequent introduction of nourishment is furnished to restore.

—Dadabhai Naoroji quoting from Mill’s History of India

Our system acts very much like a sponge, drawing up all the good things from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down on the banks of the Thames.

—John Sullivan, President, Board of Revenue, Madras

Where foreign capital has been sunk in a country, the administration of that country becomes at once the concern of the bondholders.

—The Hindu (September 1889)

It is not the pitiless operations of economic laws, but it is the thoughtless and pitiless action of the British policy; it is the pitiless eating of India’s substance in India, and the further pitiless drain to England; in short, it is the pitiless perversion of economic laws by the sad bleeding to which India is subjected, that is destroying India.

—Dadabhai Naoroji

Taxes spent in the country from which they are raised are totally different in their effect from taxes raised in one country and spent in another. In the former case the taxes collected from the population... are again returned to the industrious classes... But the case is wholly different when the taxes are not spent in the country from which they are raised... They constitute [an] absolute loss and extinction of the whole amount withdrawn from the taxed country... [The money] might as well be thrown into the sea. Such is the nature of the tribute we have so long exacted from India.

—Sir George Wingate

Under the native despot the people keep and enjoy what they produce, though at times they suffer some violence. Under the British Indian despot, the man is at peace, there is no violence; his substance is drained away, unseen, peaceably and subtly— he starves in peace, and peaceably perishes in peace, with law and order.

Dadabhai Naoroji

effect of the railways was to enable foreign goods to outsell indigenous products. Further, the benefits from impetus to steel, machinery and capital investment in railways accrued to the British. G.V. Joshi remarked, “Expenditure on railways should be seen as an Indian subsidy to British industries.”