How Ten Million Deaths Became a Theory: The British Empire’s Perfect Crime

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Oct 14, 2025 - 06:27

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How Ten Million Deaths Became a Theory: The British Empire’s Perfect Crime

Preface

This essay draws primarily from Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (2017), which systematically dismantles the mythology of benevolent British rule. Tharoor, drawing on extensive historical documentation, demonstrates how the British Empire impoverished India through deliberate policies of extraction and deindustrialization. His work provides the evidential foundation for understanding empire not as a balance sheet of costs and benefits, but as a system of ideological and economic control whose structures persist today. The essay is supplemented by two contemporary analyses examining the East India Company’s corporate innovations and the Malthusian ideology that justified imperial exploitation.

The Ornamental Deception

Lord Curzon’s 1903 Delhi Durbar deployed 173 camps, utilized 233 special trains, and gathered every maharaja in India to celebrate Edward VII’s coronation—a king who never attended. The spectacle cost millions while plague ravaged Bombay and famine stalked the countryside. This wasn’t mere extravagance but calculated theater. David Cannadine called it “Ornamentalism”—the British Empire’s use of ceremony, hierarchy, and ostentation to mask systematic extraction.

The maharajas attending Curzon’s durbar wore costumes costing fortunes, competing to display loyalty through elaborate finery. Gandhi noted in his autobiography how these rulers privately deplored the lengths required to maintain British favor—the jewels, elephants, and gold necessary to keep their hollow thrones. Every ceremonial detail reinforced hierarchies that placed British officials above Indian princes who had ruled for centuries. The Viceroy sat higher than the Mughal emperor’s descendant, deliberately demonstrating that ancient legitimacy bowed to commercial power.

This theatrical governance served precise purposes. Curzon understood that spectacle created consent. While the East India Company had initially sought “quiet trade,” by 1903 the British Raj needed Indians to internalize their subjugation. The durbar’s filmed pageantry—using then-novel moving pictures—projected imperial power across the subcontinent. Every Indian schoolchild learned their place in the ceremonial order: below the lowest British official, above only their fellow subjects.

Behind the ostentation lay devastating economic reality. When the British arrived, India generated 23 percent of world GDP; by independence, barely 4 percent. Bengal alone had produced 25 percent of global manufacturing in 1750. By 1900, that had collapsed to under 2 percent. The deindustrialization was deliberate—Indian textiles were banned from Britain while British textiles flooded Indian markets duty-free. Weavers who had clothed the world became agricultural laborers. Artisans whose skills were legendary became landless poor.

The ceremonial façade concealed this transformation’s violence. During the 1876-78 famine that killed up to 10 million, Viceroy Lytton held the largest durbar in Indian history, importing French chefs while skeletal Indians died outside the camp boundaries. The contrast wasn’t accidental but essential—the performance of prosperity amid catastrophe demonstrated imperial priorities. British officials maintained that their ceremonies brought “dignity” to Indian life while stripping Indians of economic dignity through systematic impoverishment.

Curzon himself embodied this contradiction. His viceroyalty combined genuine scholarly interest in Indian monuments with contempt for living Indians. He restored the Taj Mahal while Indians starved. He preserved ancient texts while destroying contemporary Indian industries. He celebrated India’s past greatness while ensuring its present subjugation. The durbar he orchestrated became his legacy—remembered for elephants and protocol while forgetting the five million who died during his tenure from preventable disease and starvation.

The Destruction Disguised as Development

The British claimed they gave India the railways, but the railways gave Britain India’s wealth. By 1947, India had 45,000 miles of track, fourth-largest in the world. British propaganda called this their greatest gift to India. The reality was extraction infrastructure disguised as development. Every mile was financed through Indian taxes while guaranteeing British investors 5 percent returns regardless of performance. When railways lost money, Indians paid the difference. When they profited, dividends flowed to London.

The rail network’s geography revealed its purpose. Lines ran from interior resource areas to coastal ports, not between Indian commercial centers. Cotton moved from Berar to Bombay for British mills, not to Indian weavers. The railways carried away India’s raw materials and returned British manufactured goods, completing the colonial economic circuit. Freight rates systematically favored British imports over Indian goods. A ton of cotton paid more to move within India than to ship to Manchester.

Before British rule, India dominated world textile production. Dhaka muslin was so fine that nineteen yards could pass through a ring. European aristocracy coveted Indian calicoes and cashmeres. The British systematically destroyed this industry through calculated policies. First, they imposed 70-80 percent tariffs on Indian textiles entering Britain while British textiles entered India duty-free. Then they forced Indian weavers to sell exclusively to the Company at prices 40 percent below market. Those who resisted had their thumbs cut off—a practice documented by William Bolts, himself a Company servant.

Within fifty years, India transformed from textile exporter to cotton supplier and cloth importer. Three-quarters of British textile production went to India by 1850. Cities like Dhaka, Surat, and Murshidabad—once manufacturing centers rivaling Manchester—became ghost towns. The weavers didn’t transition to other work; they starved. British officials celebrated this as progress, arguing that India’s “natural” role was supplying raw materials while Britain’s was manufacturing. Free trade ideology masked forced deindustrialization.

Education policy completed what economic policy began. Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Education created what he explicitly intended: “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” English replaced Persian as the administrative language. Indian languages were deemed incapable of conveying modern knowledge. Sanskrit and Arabic scholarship, which had preserved Greek texts during Europe’s Dark Ages, were dismissed as worthless. The new schools taught English literature while ignoring the Mahabharata and Ramayana—epics that had shaped Indian consciousness for millennia.

This educational rupture created Indians alienated from their own culture yet excluded from British society. They could quote Shakespeare but not Kalidasa. They knew British history but not their own. Gauri Viswanathan’s research reveals that English literature as an academic discipline was actually invented in India to create cultural converts to empire. These “Macaulay’s children” would administer the empire, convinced of their own inferiority and British superiority.

Manufacturing Famine as Natural Law

Between 1770 and 1947, India experienced twelve major famines under British rule, killing an estimated 60 million people. Before British control, India had faced droughts but rarely famines. The Mughal response to crop failure involved tax relief, grain distribution, and public works employment. The British replaced this with what they called scientific famine management: letting the market decide who lived or died.

The Bengal Famine of 1770 established the pattern. As ten million died—one-third of Bengal’s population—the East India Company celebrated maintaining its 12.5 percent dividend. Company officials prevented grain movement between districts to maintain price differentials. They bought rice at famine prices and sold it to their armies at profit. Warren Hastings, the Governor-General, boasted that revenue collection had actually increased despite massive depopulation. This wasn’t seen as failure but as efficient administration—maintaining extraction rates despite demographic catastrophe.

The intellectual framework justifying this came from Thomas Malthus, employed at the Company’s Haileybury College. His 1798 Essay on Population argued that famine was nature’s way of checking excess population. Indians died not because the Company forced farmers to grow opium instead of food, or because grain was exported while people starved, but because they bred beyond their means. Malthusian theory transformed policy choices into natural law. The Company wasn’t causing famines but witnessing inevitable corrections.

The 1876-78 famine revealed this ideology’s murderous logic. As drought struck southern India, Viceroy Lytton issued explicit orders prohibiting interference with market forces. “There is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food,” he declared. While up to 10 million died, India exported record quantities of grain to Britain. Lytton organized the largest durbar in Indian history, importing French chefs to feed British officials while skeletal Indians died outside the camps.

Relief efforts, when undertaken, were deliberately punitive. Richard Temple, sent to manage famine relief, created work camps providing less sustenance than Nazi concentration camps would later offer. The “Temple wage” required hard labor—breaking rocks, digging ditches—for starvation rations. The distance test required starving people to walk miles to relief centers, ensuring only the desperate would apply. Those too weak to work were classified as “undeserving poor” and left to die.

Private charity was actively discouraged. Officials argued that excessive relief would encourage dependency and increase population pressure. The Famine Commission of 1880 concluded that Indian famines resulted from “the numbers of the population” rather than British policies. The fact that famines struck only British-controlled areas while princely states managed to feed their populations was ignored. Contemporary observers recognized the deception, but Malthusian logic had become orthodox truth, making mass death appear as demographic necessity rather than political choice.

The Legal Architecture of Plunder

Lord Dalhousie’s Doctrine of Lapse represented legal innovation in service of territorial expansion. Between 1848 and 1856, this manufactured principle annexed seven major Indian states. The doctrine declared that kingdoms without direct male heirs would “lapse” to British control, dismissing centuries of Indian adoption customs. Satara, Jhansi, Nagpur—principalities that had existed for generations vanished through bureaucratic memoranda. When the Rani of Jhansi protested that adoption had been recognized for millennia, she was pensioned off. Her rebellion in 1857 would nearly destroy British rule.

The British didn’t just impose law; they invented “traditional” law that had never existed. What they codified as Hindu and Muslim personal law bore little resemblance to the fluid, locally varied practices that had governed Indian society. Caste, which had been occupational and somewhat permeable, became racial and hereditary under British legal codification. The census transformed thousands of jatis into four rigid varnas, creating hierarchies that appeared ancient but were actually colonial constructions.

The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 designated entire communities—nearly 13 million people—as hereditary criminals. These weren’t individuals convicted of crimes but entire ethnic groups declared criminal by birth. The Act stated these communities were “addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offenses.” Children were separated from parents to break the “criminal tendency.” Communities were confined to settlements, requiring permission to move. The classification justified unlimited police harassment and economic marginalization that continues today—many “denotified tribes” remain stigmatized 75 years after independence.

Property law restructured Indian society to facilitate extraction. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 created zamindars as absolute landlords where complex use-rights had existed. Peasants who had enjoyed customary protections became tenants-at-will. When drought struck, zamindars still demanded rent, forcing peasants to borrow from moneylenders at crushing interest. Within a generation, much of rural India was trapped in debt bondage. The legal system that created this crisis then enforced it through courts that operated in English using procedures incomprehensible to those they judged.

The British legal system’s most lasting damage was communalizing Indian society. Separate electorates for Muslims, introduced in 1909, institutionalized religious division. The census classified Indians by religion, making it the primary identity marker. Legal codes differed by religious community, creating parallel systems where shared customs had existed. These divisions, legally constructed and administratively reinforced, would culminate in Partition’s million dead.

Even justice became racialized. The Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883 revealed the system’s core principle: no Indian, however qualified, could judge a European. When Viceroy Ripon proposed allowing senior Indian judges to try European cases, British residents erupted in protest. Murder cases documented the disparity starkly. Europeans who killed Indians rarely faced serious consequences. Indians who killed Europeans, even in self-defense, faced execution. The legal framework survived independence remarkably intact—the sedition law used against Gandhi now silences contemporary dissent.

The Colonial Mind

Nirad C. Chaudhuri dedicated his autobiography to the British Empire: “To the memory of the British Empire in India, which conferred subjecthood upon us but withheld citizenship, to which yet every one of us threw out the challenge, ‘Civis Britannicus sum,’ because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule.” This dedication, written by an Indian intellectual in 1951, four years after independence, reveals colonialism’s deepest victory: conquering the minds of the colonized.

Chaudhuri represented the perfection of Macaulay’s project—Indians who internalized their own inferiority so completely they celebrated their subjugation. He moved to Oxford in his seventies, living out his days in conscious mimicry of English life. He saw even in Clive’s rapacity “the counterbalancing grandeur” of imperial vision. British rule hadn’t destroyed Indian civilization but saved it from itself. Without British intervention, he argued, India would have collapsed into medieval chaos.

This psychological colonization operated through education, language, and culture. The schools taught Indian children that their civilization had contributed nothing to human progress. Ancient Indian mathematics, astronomy, and medicine were dismissed as primitive superstition. The fact that Indians had calculated pi, performed cataract surgery, and developed the decimal system centuries before Europe was erased. Students learned British history while their own became mythology.

The English language became the marker of intelligence and culture. Those who spoke it were modern; those who didn’t were backward. Parents sacrificed to provide English education, knowing it determined their children’s futures. Regional languages that had produced sophisticated literature for millennia became marks of provincialism. The resulting linguistic apartheid persists—English-speaking Indians form a distinct class, economically and culturally separated from the vernacular majority.

Cultural colonization extended to aesthetics and values. Fair skin became beautiful; dark skin ugly. British dress indicated sophistication; Indian clothes suggested backwardness. The tie became mandatory in tropical heat because British bureaucracy demanded it. Indian music, dance, and art were relegated to folk curiosity while European forms represented true culture. These preferences weren’t natural but manufactured through systematic devaluation of indigenous culture and elevation of British norms.

The damage went deeper than surface preferences. Colonialism created what Ashis Nandy calls “intimate enemy”—psychological structures that made Indians complicit in their own subjugation. The colonized learned to see themselves through colonizers’ eyes, internalized their criticisms, accepted their frameworks. They didn’t just obey foreign rulers but adopted foreign consciousness. Liberation required not just political independence but psychological decolonization that remains incomplete. The colonial mind persists because its structures survive—the English-educated elite who inherited power maintained colonial attitudes toward their own people.

The Persistence of Empire

The East India Company formally dissolved in 1874, but its innovations persist in contemporary corporate practice. The Company pioneered the joint-stock corporation with limited liability, allowing investors to profit from exploitation while avoiding responsibility for its consequences. Today’s multinationals deploy identical structures—shareholders in New York profit from factories in Bangladesh without liability for collapsed buildings or poisoned rivers. The separation of ownership from accountability that enabled the Bengal Famine operates in every corporate atrocity.

Modern corporations follow templates the Company created. It manufactured intellectual frameworks justifying exploitation—Malthusian theory that blamed poverty on overpopulation rather than extraction. Today’s corporations produce similar ideologies. Pharmaceutical companies create diseases to sell cures. Technology companies claim to connect humanity while surveilling and manipulating behavior. Oil companies continue to pollute and fund anti-nuclear propaganda while positioning themselves as environmental leaders. The Company’s discovery that controlling narrative matters as much as controlling resources guides every corporate public relations campaign.

The revolving door between Company service and Parliament that Edmund Burke denounced operates globally today. Corporate executives become regulators; regulators join corporations they supervised. Goldman Sachs alumni run central banks and finance ministries worldwide. This isn’t corruption but system design—corporate capture of government that the Company pioneered. The Company’s nabobs who bought parliamentary seats with Bengali gold presage contemporary oligarchs purchasing political influence through campaign contributions and lobbying.

The false dichotomy about empire—was it good or bad?—obscures the real question. Ferguson and his fellow imperial apologists enumerate railways and English education. Critics list famines and exploitation. This debate deliberately misses the point. Empire wasn’t a balance sheet of benefits and costs but a system of ideological control that transformed both colonizer and colonized. The infrastructure and institutions were mechanisms of extraction, not gifts. The question isn’t whether Indians benefited from railways but why railways were built to carry away resources rather than connect Indian communities.

The colonial structures persist because they serve contemporary power. The World Bank and IMF impose structural adjustment programs identical to Company policies—forcing countries to grow export crops while their people starve, demanding privatization of public resources, requiring adoption of Western economic models. The language changed from civilizing mission to development assistance, but the mechanics remain identical. Former colonies export raw materials and import manufactured goods, trapped in economic relationships established centuries ago.

The psychological colonization proves most enduring. Former colonies measure progress by Western standards, pursue development through Western models, evaluate themselves through Western eyes. The inferiority complex Macaulay cultivated makes genuine independence impossible. Political decolonization occurred, but mental colonization continues. The Company’s greatest victory was convincing the colonized that colonialism’s structures were natural, necessary, and beneficial. Understanding empire’s true nature matters because its patterns repeat. When technology companies claim to democratize information while concentrating control, they follow templates the Company created. The Company ruled until it didn’t. What changes them isn’t moral awakening but organized resistance that recognizes their true nature and refuses to accept it.

References

Primary Source:

Tharoor, Shashi. Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India. London: Hurst & Company, 2017.

Supporting Essays:

“The Big Lie About Too Many People: How Malthus and the East India Company invented overpopulation to justify empire.” Lies are Unbekoming, August 31, 2025.
“The East India Company: The Corporation That Ate the World - How History’s Most Powerful Business Created Modern Capitalism and Colonial Catastrophe.” Lies are Unbekoming, September 9, 2025.

Key Historical Sources Referenced in Tharoor:

Burke, Edmund. Speeches on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 1788-1795.
Chaudhuri, Nirad C. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. London: Macmillan, 1951.
Digby, William. ‘Prosperous’ British India: A Revelation from Official Records. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901.
Durant, Will. The Case for India. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1930.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “Minute on Education,” February 2, 1835.
Malthus, Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle of Population. London: J. Johnson, 1798.
Naoroji, Dadabhai. Poverty and Un-British Rule in India. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1901.
Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

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