The year 1857 marked the year in which Indian natives would revolt against the British superpower that had exploited their people for over 200 years.
For starters it's treating Britain like a superpower anachronistically, it was not then. Seconds it's treating the "Indian natives" like one homogenous group, completely ignoring their vast heterogenous, syncretic and diverse heritages, the divisions of which were key to exploiting to maintain colonial rule.
That it goes on to paint the British as bad guys exploiting the natives for 200 years instead of actually explaining what it is that was exploitative likewise shows in typical American fashion a fear of finding out similarities in their own nation, instead determining that killing bad guys will fix all their problems.
The "Indian Mutiny" is a good name, though its most common name is the "Sepoy Mutiny." This is because it started with a military mutiny, though I like the sense of an emerging national identity that "Indian Mutiny" conjures.
In the years roughly between 1600 and 1950, the British used the foreign land of India to their advantage. These were the years of British Empire and expansion.
The fucking sloppiness of these dates holy fucking shit why
The use imperialistic powers to benefit economically, politically, and geographically began with the British East India Company in the early 1600s where the land was used for spice trade and provided as a trading post for both British, Dutch and other settling imperialists at the next 100 years.
"Imperialist powers" ahahaha, so much focus on bad guys but fuck all to say about what they were doing, who did them, why they happened, why they succeeded and so on. I don't have time to go into detail on this, but the whole things started out as mercantile endeavours, trade was not a distraction to imperial expansion - trade was everything that made imperial expansion not only possible, but a prime objective.
As time went on, the land was beginning to have more and more British influence and would eventually gain a powerful military presence.
Vague references to influence just appearing and the British just having a powerful military presence appear. None of the actual interesting stuff about how the British gained influence with local allies or how the EIC went from defeating the Dutch trading companies with their spice trade in Indonesia and the French EIC with the third carnatic war, or how indeed the EIC went from being a private chartered company to controlling the most powerful westernized military force in the subcontinent, primed to become a geopolitical player in its own right. How the hell do you manage to make that sound boring?
In the late 1700s, millions of Indians were under British rule and were forced to work on plantations were they would be treated more like slaves than workers.
Stuff like this is what I'm talking about. They take something incredibly intriguing and dumb it down because they think Americans are morons who can only understand heroes and villains, cowboys and indians.
Britain destroyed the slave trade. The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, the loss of British maritime insurers for slavers, the loss of British ships and sailors for transporting slaves, that would have been enough to shut down a lot of the transatlantic slave trade in Britain, the Netherlands, France, Portugal and Spain. Yet with the ascension of the Royal Navy and its subsequent dominance of the seas upon the defeat of Napoleon, this massive navy with no enemy to fight was critical in monitoring the seas and suppressing the trade, forcing international treaties with the remaining slaver nations in Europe and the Americas to ban slavery - and bombarding the shit out of slaver settlements that refused until they changed their mind. British merchants even went so far as to suggest replacements to West African rulers to replace palm oil with slaves as their export commodity, in order to remove the financial incentives for both importers and exporters of slaves. Taken together, the removal of incentives to buy and sell people with the massive policing of the seas shut down the slave trade across the world, whilst the USA was still debating about it.
Despite taking such a profound pride and role in emancipating the world, it is curious then that this was accompanied by Imperial expansion.
"Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves,
Britons never shall be slaves."
How could a people be so proud of liberating the world, whilst on the other hand waging great wars of Imperialism? Does it at all sound familiar to have a world power waging wars of domination in the name of FREEDOM?
Slavery was stopped, people weren't going to be owned as property. Yet the demand for cheap labour was ever-so strong, and the Imperial economy needed its cheap serfs. Problem is, how do you legally work people like slaves, without enslaving them? Thus, the indentured worker. Imagine debt-slavery on crack cocaine, where you're voluntarily in the system in the same way that in the desert, you can voluntarily choose to leave an oasis and die. Mass media was a thing, and you get this curious duality that persists where the affluent Londoners kept trying to stamp out the unethical treatment of natives by various colonial governments, whilst the colonial governments tried to preserve their cheap labour. Much problems occurred within the British Empire because on some levels it was too centralized and others, much too little. Too complicated to simplify, so I'm skipping it (time).
At the time, the Indian people were going a devastating famine due to all of their crops being exported to maximize profits for the British occupying their land.
Fucks sakes put a date on it
Anyways what happened was in Bengal, marauding warriors from the Maratha caste of noble-soldiers devastated the land, looting the fuck out of it. Thus, the people were already in a precarious situation. At this point the EIC relied heavily on taxes based around agricultural produce, thus destroyed much land for Indigo dye and opium production, later cotton production, all very big cash crops that took the place of grain. In addition, they outlawed the stocking of rice, so as to further increase the price of rice and artificially inflate its price (thus, their revenues). Things are all right until one year there is a shortfall of crops, but shit like that happens so it's ignored. By 1769 this is compounded by a severe drought, and conditions go from less than optimal to millions are starving to death all under the oversight of EIC officers who didn't give a/f, the reports of rural starvation being largely ignored by them. That year profits increased greatly, and the survivors of the famine moved to EIC controlled cities because they were the only ones that had food.
At this point, Britain was reliant on the trade monopoly in India to support their economy and the goal seemed to no longer be to establish trade in India, but to use military force to take advantage.
At this point, Britain was the first nation in the world to industrialize, which was what was driving the British economy. I guess, I don't know because it has no fucking dates on anything. No mention of textiles, manufacturing, deindustrialization, the need for raw materials D:
The Indian people would eventually revolt against the imperial British. After Indian resistance and mistakes from the Company in the mid-1800s, the British East India Company fell and slowly the British were losing power overseas.
The latter bit is factually incorrect, the British would reach their zenith of power as the greatest Empire to have ever been seen, followed by its complete and total collapse upon the altars of world war. The former is hilarious in how much is excised
Fundamental to Indian resistance in this last crucial phase of the old order was not vague unexplained "mistakes" from the Company, it was a belief in British paramountcy. Britain dominated the economy of the Indian subcontinent, dominated the politics of the Indian subcontinent - it was not a short step to take, to dominate the culture of the Indian subcontinent. Much of India was brought into the fold with subsidiary alliances with the EIC, wherein the company would protect Indian princely states in return for submission - this of course, being like inviting a tiger to protect your home, sooner or later it will devour you, even if your home is well-guarded. Thus loyal Princes could expect the full support of the EIC, but as soon as they died heirless, the EIC would annex their land and replace their administration with a very Western bureaucracy.
This naturally produced a large group of dispossessed noblemen who saw their Princedoms being slowly chipped away by a foreign bureaucracy, like the ocean whittling away the mountain. This was the first pillar of the revolt.
The second was the Brahma caste, the caste of noble-warriors who under the company were largely made obsolete or lost their lucrative position as a noble warrior. This is especially brutal considering how the westernized sepoys serving under the company were held in higher esteem despite many coming from lower castes - and the westernized sepoys fought far superior. This formed the second pillar of the revolt.
The third was the British-led Westernization of India. Christian Missionaries challenged Hindu beliefs and doctrines, turning Hindus into Christians, greatly alarming orthodox Hindus. Christians were given equal rights to inherit with Hindus, efforts were made to emancipate Hindu women with such things as the removal of legal obstacles to remarrying, worst of all - the introduction of Western education, which would take Hindu children and return them speaking English. This would form the third pillar of revolt.
The final would be the sepoys themselves. The sepoys were significant and the root of the revolt for the simple reason that they were a disciplined and organized fighting force - tellingly, the only level of Indian society that was allowed to be organized by the EIC. The British introduced a new rifle, the famous Lee Enfield rifle, which was to the British Empire what the AK47 was to the Soviet Union. To activate the cartridge of the bullet, one had to bite it, and a rumour spread that the bullets were coated in pork and beef fat - though no evidence suggests this was true, the EIC officers did nothing to quell these rumours as false. Thus both Muslin and Hindu sepoys took this as an insult, and discontent grew.
With all the pillars of revolt primed, the first bullet would be fired with a fist: a sepoy attacked his British officers, they arrested and executed him. Next month some sepoys were issued their Enfield bullets and they refused, as a result they were given long prison sentences, placed in irons and jail. Their comrades were incensed and broke them free, shooting all of their officers and marching to Delhi, which at that time had no European soldiers at all. There they made an attempt to revive the Mughal Empire, with the revolt spreading throughout India. The EIC and the major princely states versus the four pillars of the old order. The fighting was bitter and grim, with the rebels possessed of particular ferocity, killing all who supported the British or adopted Western ways, with particular ill treatment to women and children. The British responded mercilessly, with hundreds of sepoys bayoneted or executed via cannon, to the point where even some of their own officers found the actions of their soldiers excessive.
Eventually, India would become its own state in 1947 in part to the efforts of Indian soldiers and other supporting members of Indian liberation. Due to the many years of military presence, forced labor, and economic monopoly, the British Empire in India fell.
The simplification is painful, very painful. Continuing from what I said before, the failure of the rebellion marked the death of the old order and the advent of the new. The old aristocracy was either in full support of the British or it had died supporting the rebellion, the education system remained intact and merely increased in its scope and coverage, the British took greater interest in India after the rebellion not less, and the indirect rule of the EIC was replaced with direct rule from a civil bureaucracy directly accountable to Westminster. India's finances were reorganized, its administration reorganized, its army reorganized, and great effort was made towards creating a class of native civil administrators. The educational and public works programs (roads, railways, telegraphs, and irrigation) continued with accelerated pace, and though the British ceased any action that would be provocative to Hindu society, by that point the old traditional power structures were toast. It would not be the aristocratic remnants of Mongol Empires that would win India her independence in the end, it would be her new educated middle class that remembered not divided Kingdoms, but dreamed instead of one India.
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