Lesson video

Hello, I'm Mr. Benger.

Welcome to today's lesson, lesson two in our enquiry, what did British colonialism look like in the 19th century? We've got a great lesson ahead of us today, looking at colonialism in India, a very important and challenging history.

Before we get started, though, make sure you've got a pen, make sure you've got your paper, and make sure that you're free from any distractions so you can concentrate fully on this lesson.

Thank you, let's get going.

So we're going to start this lesson by looking at this rather shocking image.

Have a look at what's happening here.

Now, you can see some men in red uniforms standing next to some cannons.

And if you can look there right in the middle, strapped to the front of the cannon is an Indian man, and we've got a lot of these people lined up, strapped to these cannons.

The people in red, the soldiers in red, are British soldiers.

If this scene seems shocking, that's because that's exactly what it was meant to do.

This was meant to be a shocking form of punishment.

But why were the British doing this to these Indian people? Let's find out.

So, in order to explain the scene in this painting, we have to look back at the background of British involvement in India over the years, and in 1600, the East India Company was created and approved by Queen Elizabeth.

The East India Company went to India in search of money, profit, and influence.

At this time, though, India was ruled by the powerful Mughal Empire.

However, over time, as the Mughal Empire weakened, the East India Company, through a mixture of ruthlessness, violence, and luck, found itself in a position to assume control over increasingly large parts of India.

However, the East India Company was an unpopular ruling power among many Indians.

And in 1857, large groups of Indians, for various reasons, rebelled against the British East India Company rule and tried to get rid of the British.

The British used military force and violence to crush the rebellions and brutal punishments against those who had opposed them.

And so, after the rebellion, the East India Company was abolished, and the British government took direct control over much of India.

It would be another 90 years before Indian independence in 1947.

So our painting, then, depicts a scene from this time here, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, when the British crushed the rebellions against British rule and tried to use brutal punishments.

Now, they used brutal punishments like the one we can see here in order to deter, to prevent Indians from ever challenging British power again.

And they knew that this kind of punishment was incredibly terrifying to the Indian people, because most Indians at this time were Hindu or Muslim, and blowing them from cannons like this, blowing them to pieces would mean they wouldn't be able to have a proper Hindu or Muslim burial.

Some officials also justified, or some British officials also justified this brutal punishment by saying that violence, these kind of brutal punishments, were the only thing that the backwards, the barbarous, backwards peoples of India could understand, showing their racist beliefs about the Indian people.

So, returning to our enquiry question, a big question that we're looking at over these four lessons, what did British colonialism look like in the 19th century? Well, we've just seen one example of what it looked like in 1857 in India, and in this lesson, we're going to be looking at what British colonialism looked like after 1857 in India as the British looked to rebuild and re-establish their control over the Indian people.

Where did we get to last lesson? Well, last lesson, you'll remember that we started identifying and exploring some of the key features, the common features of colonialism identified by historians, that it involved political dominance, economic exploitation, and culturalism and racism.

But we also remember that, last lesson, we said that colonialism doesn't happen on a map, it happens in real places to real people.

And so today, we're going to be looking at what these things actually looked like for the Indian people in India.

Okay, so if you need to remind yourself of any of these definitions of the key features of colonialism, pause the video now, and have a look at the definitions on the screen that we saw last lesson.

If you are confident, though, let's move on and check your understanding.

So, which option is correct? The East India Company acted ruthlessly in India in search of profit.

Is that an example of economic exploitation or political dominance? Pause the video now if you need more time to think.

Okay, yes, it is an example of economic exploitation, looking for profit, looking for money.

Let's move on to another one.

When many Indians rebelled against Company rule in 1857, the British responded ruthlessly to restore their power.

Is that an example of economic exploitation, political dominance, or culturalism? Which one fits best there? Again, pause if you need time to think.

Okay, so I've said that that's mainly about political dominance, because it's about restoring the power of Britain after the conflict.

You could also say it's linked to culturalism, because Britain is trying to say it's a better culture, so it should rule the country.

But yeah, political dominance might be the one that fits best there.

Next one, terrifying British punishment against the rebels was deliberately designed to stop them having a proper Muslim or Hindu burial.

Which option fits best there out of those four? Pause the video if you need time to think.

Okay, so I've said that's mostly evidence of culturalism, because they are deliberately attacking the religions, the cultures, of the Indian people and trying to terrorise them, using this culture against them.

Finally, the British used terrifying punishment against Indians, because they said it was the only way to strike terror into a semi-barbarous people.

Again, which option is best there? Okay, so I said that could be culturalism or racism.

It's probably a mix of both.

The idea here is they're saying that the Indian people are semi-barbarous, that they're backwards, so that could be a backwards culture or a backwards race.

But either way, they're saying that they are a backwards people that they need to strike terror into to help them to understand British power.

So let's start looking in a bit more detail at this question.

What did British colonialism look like in India after 1857? How did the British try to re-establish, to reassert and rebuild their power and control? How did they try and rebuild colonialism in India after the Great Rebellion of 1857? Looking back at our key features, we're going to start with political dominance.

How do they try and build back their political power over the country? We've already seen that they use military force and violence.

We've also seen down here that Indians resisted this.

But ultimately, the British force was too much, and British did reassert control.

One of the main things that Britain did to reassert its control was to rebuild the hierarchy.

The East India Company, they got rid of that.

And then, they brought in a new system.

Queen Victoria was at the top of the hierarchy as queen.

In 1877, she gained the title of the Empress of India, and she was the ultimate power.

But she appointed a viceroy, a governor in India.

The viceroy was the top governor in India who was ultimately in charge of maintaining control over the country.

The governor lived in this really grand house, or, not even a house, a building, in the city of Kolkata.

Grand buildings like this were designed to show off British power, to project just how powerful they were.

Now, the viceroy didn't rule by himself.

Below him, he had the Indian Civil Service.

These were people who helped to rule the country but were below the viceroy.

All of the top positions in the Civil Service, these people running the country, were white British men.

However, Indian people could get into the Civil Service but very low down the hierarchy.

They would be doing the jobs at a more local level, far lower down.

They made sure, though, that British people always had the top jobs and were at the top of this hierarchy.

One of the things that these British people in power did once they regained control was to instal a new system of law.

So they created new laws for India.

Now, they said that these laws were to restore order to the country, to make it more civilised.

Actually, who were these laws for? Well, these laws were not mainly there to protect Indians.

In fact, they were there to protect the British.

The British were always scared, paranoid, that the Indians might rebel again, or that the British might lose control over the country.

And so, they used the law in order to keep Indian people below them and under control.

In the countryside, in places like you can see in this photo, which is a tea plantation where Indians would be forced to work almost like slaves and by British tea planters who would make a lot of money from these plantations.

Now, sometimes or a lot of the time, these British people would attack and beat their workers, sometimes killing them.

However, in the countryside, British people could only be judged by British judges.

Indian judges weren't allowed to rule on their cases.

And so, often, these British judges just let them off if they killed Indian people.

They said that the Indian people were naturally weak, and that's why they died, not because they were attacked.

It's clear from these examples that the law in India was mainly designed to uphold the power of the British.

Another feature of British colonialism in India is that it was a very distant style of rule.

The photo you can see on the screen here shows the bustling streets of the city of Amritsar in India.

However, British people would rarely go to these streets.

They certainly wouldn't think they had to ask the people what they thought or try to understand them.

This is linked to these ideas of culturalism and racism, these other features of colonialism.

They thought they were above the Indian people, that if they were ruling the country, they didn't need to ask the Indian people what they thought should be done or for their opinions.

And they didn't feel like they needed to be close to the Indian people who were, to them or to the British, they called them an inferior race, a worse people.

And so, they didn't really feel like they needed to be particularly friendly with them.

So, a very distant style of rule.

Many British officials lived in places like this in India, bungalows like this, where they would live relatively separate from the Indian people and near to other white British people.

So they tried to have quite clear racial and cultural boundaries to stay apart from the Indian people.

Under the East India Company, actually, quite a lot of British people married Indian women.

But, after the Rebellion of 1857 especially, Britons started discouraging, started telling British men not to marry Indian women and to try and keep the race, as they would say, pure, to try and have British men marry British, white women and not to mix with Indians.

And so, this is another example of that racism, trying to keep those boundaries between British and Indian people.

British people also tended to socialise together.

So they would go to British clubs where they would meet each other and socialise, and we can see this quote here from a British official who said, "Heads were bent over English newspapers, "their thoughts far away but close to mine.

"Outside, Indian people prayed "and plotted and mated and died "on a scale unimaginable and uncomfortable." And so, what he's saying here is that, in the English club, he's with other English people reading English newspapers.

They know each other.

He's got quite a negative, and very distant, and quite disrespectful and offensive view of what Indian society is like outside.

And so, just to sum up and check your understanding of what we looked at so far, have a go at this.

So which one of these finishes off this sentence accurately? Britain's priority after the 1857 rebellion was to.

Was it to restore British power and maintain a position above the Indian people, or was it to listen to the complaints of Indian people and work with them to make changes.

Pause the video if you need time to think.

Okay, yes, so the answer is this first one.

Britain was mainly concerned with restoring its power and maintaining that separation, that position above the Indian people.

So we've seen how the British tried to rebuild their power after the Great Rebellion of 1857.

But after the rebellion, the British also increasingly tried to justify their rule, to say that it was good and right.

Why should the British rule a people who, in 1857, tried to get rid of them? Well, one of the ways in which the British justified their rule was by claiming that British rule was bringing progress and civilization to India.

From 1861, the British started publishing an annual moral and material progress report, a report, basically, that was designed to say, "Look at all the good stuff we're doing in India." One of the main things that this report focused on was the building of railways.

And you can see in this map here from 1909, all those black lines going all over India are the many thousands of miles of railway the British built in India.

Now, the railways looked to the British like evidence of progress, or at least, they said it did.

But who did the railways actually help? Well, what the Governor of Bombay said in 1863 can give us a bit of a clue, because in 1863, the British Governor of Bombay made a speech to celebrate the opening of a new railway.

And he boasted that the railways were a great British achievement.

He compared them to the greatest achievements of mankind over history, things like the pyramids in Egypt.

He commented that the railways would boost British military strength and power.

But there was a strange thing that was missing.

He said little, however, about how the railways would help the Indian people.

In fact, he even suggested that the greatest benefit to Indian people from the railways would not come from travelling on them but would come from working to build them.

To many Indians, therefore, the railways didn't really seem like progress to them and their ordinary lives.

So while the British were claiming that this was a time of great progress, great economic progress, actually, to many Indians, British rule in the 19th century, the late 19th century, didn't seem like a time of progress at all.

And between 12 to 30 million Indians are estimated to have died in the last quarter of the 19th century in some of the worst famines in history.

A famine means a time when there's a massive shortage of food.

People aren't able to get the food they need to eat.

And 12 to 30 million people died in the last 25 years of the 19th century.

The Indian district of Bellary is one example of a place that experienced famine.

In the district of Bellary, the arrival of cheap cloth made in British factories meant that many Indian women lost their jobs making cloth.

Meanwhile, the price of food was rising, and bad weather conditions meant that the farming work carried out by many Indian men collapsed.

So, Indian women losing their jobs, Indian men not able to do farming to get food.

As a result, Indian peasant families couldn't afford enough to eat.

The British government's response to this was slow and inadequate.

The most common form of relief that the British provided was work relief.

Now, this was a form of relief, a form of help, in which starving Indians would have to carry out hard, physical labour, breaking stones, building things, in return for a small amount of money to help them and foods to help them while they were starving.

Furthermore, this relief did nothing to solve the big issue of increasing poverty in India.

And between 1876 and 1877, around 1/5 of Bellary's population died at a population of a million, so, about 200,000 people dying.

Okay, so let's consolidate our understanding of exactly what happened in the Indian district of Bellary.

Bellary, a place that experienced famine like many other places in India in the late 19th century.

Have a look at the stages of the story on the right-hand side of the screen.

Pause the video, and see if you can put them in the right order.

Only write down the bits in bold.

If you want to, you can write the whole thing if you would prefer.

Pause the video, and have a go at putting these in the right order, please.

Okay, let's move on now to check our answers.

So, pause the slide here to check whether you've got these events in the right order.

So, pause now to have a check.

Give yourself a tick if you got them right.

Correct it if you got something a little bit out of order.

Okay, so, coming back to our key features then, what we've seen there seems like an example of the economic exploitation that are involved in colonialism.

The British were charging taxes in India, the British were using cheap Indian labour, for example, in those tea plantations we saw earlier where Indian workers were not treated very well, but British people were profiting from that.

But at the same time, it didn't seem like many ordinary Indians were gaining benefits from this.

India experienced, for millions of Indians, some of the worst famines in human history.

So, how did Indian people themselves respond to British colonialism? What did they do? Well, a lot of Indian people resisted colonialism and also turned towards strategies of self-help.

Now, what does this mean? Well, different groups in Indian society responded to British colonialism in different ways.

One example is that the peasants waged campaigns and protests in the countryside against British plantation owners and rich Indian land owners.

For example, in the Indigo Revolt of 1859, peasants protested against being forced, often violently, to plant indigo.

This was a plant that was used to make blue dyes for clothes to be sold in Europe.

The government used the military to crush this peasant uprising, this peasant revolt, against being forced violently to plant a certain crop that didn't make them very much money at all, killing a number of peasants.

However, the peasants did succeed in the end, because in 1860, the government passed the Indigo Act, which made it illegal for British planters to force the peasants to grow indigo.

Another increasingly popular response to British colonialism in the late 19th century was this idea of self-help.

Now, this was the idea that Indians couldn't rely on the British colonial government to help them, so they should set up their own organisations to help themselves.

Indian religion and Indian culture were important in these efforts.

For example, in the small town of Deoband, a centre for Islamic education was set up called Darul Uloom, the house of knowledge.

So, this idea that Indians will now be educating themselves, helping themselves.

Meanwhile, Arya Samaj was a Hindu organisation set up for the improvement of India.

One of its founders, Lajpat Rai, helped to set up the Punjab National Bank in 1894, so, an Indian bank.

This bank was designed to help Indian people and Indian businesses who were often not given any help by British banks.

So British banks often didn't help Indian businesses to set themselves up, so they set up their own bank to do it for themselves.

Well done, we've learned a massive amount today about colonialism in India, and you're now ready to test and check your understanding with these comprehension questions.

You can pause the screen now if you want to read them on here, and you should be able to answer them from what we've learned today.

Also, have a go at the challenge question.

You'll need to read the challenge reading in the reading worksheet for this.

So pause the video, read the slides on the next page, and answer the comprehension questions.

Come back to this video once you've done any reading you need to do to remind yourself of what we've learned and once you've had a go at answering the questions.

Okay, welcome back.

Thank you for having a go at those comprehension questions.

Let's go through some possible answers now.

So, question one, what happened in 1857, and how did the British respond? An acceptable answer, many Indians rebelled, and the British responded brutally.

A good answer, in 1857, many Indians rebelled against the rule of the British East India Company.

In response, the British used military force to regain control of the country.

This included blowing rebels to pieces from cannons to strike terror among the Indian people.

This form of punishment deliberately targeted Indian's religious beliefs and was justified by some British officials as the only way to control what they thought of as an inferior or worse race of people.

Question two, in what ways.

Sorry, I forgot to say, pause the video, of course, if you need some more time to write down or add corrections to your answers.

Let's keep going.

So in what ways was British rule distant from the Indian people? An acceptable answer, the British did not allow Indian people a say in governing the country and usually lived separately from the Indian people.

A good answer, the British ruled with a strict hierarchy that placed the British at the top.

All of the top positions in the government and the Indian Civil Service went to British people, while Indians had little say in the governing of their country.

The British reinforced their place above the Indians by living separately from them and maintaining cultural and racial barriers between themselves and the people they claimed to rule.

Pause if you need some time to have a look at those again.

Question three, who were the railways for? An acceptable answer, the British.

A good answer, the railways mainly served to benefit the British.

They were often built for political and military reasons, to secure the dominance of Britain over Indian land and people.

The Governor of Bombay even suggested that the main benefit Indian people would get from the railways was not travelling on them, but rather, working to make them.

Railways failed to prevent some of the worst famines in Indian history.

Question four, how did Indian people try to help themselves? An acceptable answer, through creating their own institutions and organisations.

A good answer, some Indians tried to improve their conditions by protesting, for example, peasants in the Indigo Riots.

Others turned towards self-help strategies including building their own institutions, for example, Darul Uloom in Deoband or setting up the Punjab National Bank for Indians.

These self-help strategies were often organised through Indian religious and cultural communities.

And finally, our challenge question, question five, what does the story of Sayyid Mahmood tell us about the barriers facing Indian people under British colonialism? A fascinating story here about this individual, Sayyid Mahmood.

An acceptable answer, Indians faced many difficulties in keeping important positions of power.

A good answer, Sayyid Mahmood was one of the few Indians who reached a very important position as a High Court judge.

However, once he got there, he faced clear racial barriers, as his fellow judges didn't treat him as an equal.

This eventually led to him to lose his job as a High Court judge.

Okay, thank you.

As we're nearing the end of our lesson, you've done absolutely brilliant work today, as we've looked through a number of different, really important, but challenging issues about British colonialism in India.

We're going, now, for the final section, to return to our enquiry question, what did British colonialism look like in the 19th century? Well, today, we've seen what it looks like in India, and we've mainly focused on that period after 1857.

We've looked at a number of different angles, a number of different perspectives, for what colonialism looked like in India.

And we're going to finish off just by bringing it all together, trying to have a look at a lot of the different things we've looked at and try and analyse what aspects of colonialism these things all represent.

So you can see at the top, I've got our headings, our features of colonialism, physical dominance, economic exploitation, culturalism and racism, and I've added resistance there, because Indian resistance was very important feature of colonialism in India.

Now, at the moment, these headings, or, sorry, at the moment, all the different aspects are in random places.

So I haven't put them under the column that I think they fit best.

What I want you to do is to have a look carefully at this and to try and think where does each one go? For example, this one here, the viceroy being in charge, we've got the viceroy, we've got his big building there that he stayed in and worked in.

So, the viceroy being in charge, I'd probably move that under the political dominance column, because the viceroy was at the top of the hierarchy, governing India, well, just below Queen Victoria, but he was at the top of the people actually in India.

And so, he was part of that political hierarchy.

I'd move that there.

Another example, the Indian Rebellion, an example of Indian resistance.

So I'd probably move that over here to our resistance column.

Now, you might find that some of these seem like they fit in more than one area, and there's good reasons for that, because all these things are linked together.

But for now, see if you can place them under the heading that you think they fit best.

So pause the video now, and we'll come back in a moment to discuss.

So let's discuss what we've got.

I'm going to share with you what I've done.

So here on the screen are my choices, where I've put these different things.

But there are discussions to be had here.

And so, if you've put them in slightly different places, that's not a problem.

If we look here at building the railways, I've put that under political dominance.

Now, some people might say the railways has to do with the economy, and they certainly are.

But I've decided to put them in political dominance, because I think, agreeing with John Wilson, historian John Wilson's argument, I think the railways, a lot of the reason they were built was to establish British power and to increase British military strength.

Another example here is the plantations.

Now, I've put the plantations under economic exploitation, because it's about using cheap Indian labour to work for British planters.

However, we've also seen earlier that this can come under political dominance, or it has links to it, because the British law was used to protect the plantation owners even if they mistreated their workers.

We can also put this under culturalism and racism, because the law was used to favour white people and to help reinforce the racial hierarchy of white people being above the Indian people.

So we can see these things are all linked together.

They can't just go in one place.

Another example, distant rule over here.

Distant rule I put under culturalism and racism, because the British tried to keep their position away from the Indian people, above them.

But that's also clearly to do with political dominance, for example, because it's about the way the British ruled the country, the ways they exercised their power, and the fact that the structures and the ways they did this were culturalist and racist.

Of course, Indians also resisted this form of distant rule at times.

And therefore, we could also link it to these ideas of resistance.

And so, we can see that we can put these in a number of places, and they're all linked together.

So have a look at yours.

Think about what links you could draw.

What things could you have put in different places? I just want to thank you for joining me for this lesson and letting me share with you this history of colonialism in India.

We now know a bit about what British colonialism looked like in India.

Now, obviously, there's far more that I could have included in this lesson but we didn't have time to cover, as with all history.

But I hope I've given you at least a snapshot of what colonialism looked like in India.

Before we finish, let's just look ahead to what we're going to be doing next lesson.

So, next lesson, we'll be moving on to lesson three of our enquiry to explore what settler colonialism looked like in Australia.

And we'll start to return and think about our enquiry question, and think, did colonialism in Australia look similar to colonialism in India? And in what ways did it look different? So that's next lesson, but today, all that's left for me to say is well done for your hard work today.

Stop the video, and move onto the final quiz.

Thank you, and I hope that you will join me next time.