When the British left it was just above 3 per cent. When the East India Company took control of the country, in the chaos that ensued after the collapse of the Mughal empire, India s share of world GDP was 23 per cent. Besides the deaths of Indians, British rule impoverished India in a manner that beggars belief. Almost thirty-five million Indians died because of acts of commission and omission by the British in famines, epidemics, communal riots and wholesale slaughter like the reprisal killings after the 1857 War of Independence and the Amritsar massacre of 1919. He was not the only one to denounce the rapacity and cruelty of British rule, and his assessment was not exaggerated. In 1930, the American historian and philosopher Will Durant wrote that Britain s conscious and deliberate bleeding of India.
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