British India

India's share of world GDP collapsed from 24% to 4% between 1700 and 1947—a decline unmatched in economic history. The territory governed directly or indirectly by Britain during this period encompassed 4.9 million square kilometers and 390 million people at its height, stretching from the Khyber Pass to the Burmese border, from Kashmir to Cape Comorin. Studying British India reveals how parasitic relationships can persist for nearly a century while appearing, on paper, mutually beneficial.

The transformation from trade to extraction began with commercial opportunism. The East India Company arrived in 1600 seeking spices and textiles. For 150 years, it operated as a trading enterprise, purchasing Bengal muslins and Gujarati calicos that commanded premium prices in European markets. The phase transition occurred in 1757, when Robert Clive's victory at Plassey delivered control of Bengal's treasury. The Diwani of 1765—the right to collect land revenues across Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa—transformed a merchant company into a tax-farming operation. By 1858, after the Sepoy Rebellion exposed the Company's administrative failures, the Crown assumed direct control. The extraction continued; only the letterhead changed.

The Raj's economic machinery operated through three interlocking systems. First, the 'drain of wealth': revenues extracted as land taxes, collected in rupees, converted to sterling, and remitted to London without equivalent goods or services flowing back. Economist Dadabhai Naoroji identified this pattern in the 1870s; modern estimates by Utsa Patnaik calculate cumulative extraction equivalent to trillions of dollars, though these figures remain debated among economic historians. Second, competitive exclusion through deindustrialization: between 1800 and 1860, textile exports from India fell 98% while British imports surged 6,300%. Bengal's weavers, who had clothed pharaohs and Mughal emperors, were reduced to landless agricultural laborers—some winders reportedly cut off their own thumbs rather than be forced to produce silk for Company agents. Third, infrastructure as extraction pipeline: the railways that grew from 200 miles in 1858 to 65,000 kilometers by 1947 were engineered to move raw cotton and grain from interior to port, not to integrate internal markets. Construction costs ran £15,000 per mile above comparable American rates, paid from Indian revenues to British contractors.

The human cost cascaded through the system. Major famines killed an estimated 30-60 million people between 1850 and 1947. The Great Famine of 1876-78 claimed over 8 million lives while the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, continued wheat exports and imposed strict tests for relief eligibility that critics compared to workhouse brutality. The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed 3 million; historians continue to debate the relative contributions of war logistics, market failures, provincial politics, and imperial policy priorities. These were not purely natural disasters but trophic cascades—the systematic extraction of resources at the top of the food chain collapsed survival margins below.

Partition in 1947 completed the biological parallel. When a host finally rejects its parasite, the separation rarely proceeds cleanly. Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer who had never visited South Asia, drew the boundary line in five weeks—dividing 88 million people between two new nations. The Radcliffe Line split Punjab and Bengal down their centers, separating villages from their wells and farmers from their fields. Mass migrations of 14-18 million people and sectarian violence killing 1-2 million followed. Pakistan and Bangladesh emerged as severed fragments; India inherited the railways, the civil service, and the administrative boundaries—path dependence encoded in steel and bureaucracy that still shapes the subcontinent.

For deeper exploration of extraction dynamics, see India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; for the imperial perspective, see United Kingdom.