Look, I know it can be hard when the history of your country only goes back 200 years, but we didn’t invade India for the tea. There wasn’t any in India when we got there.
We started growing it there to reduce our dependency on Chinese tea, and in return we gave China a crippling opium addiction. And they gave us Hong Kong until 1999, or something.
I mean obviously not india as it is now, but there were and had been kingdoms there for well over 1500 years.
And also you went there because of the massive trade that we had. At one point almost all the gold in Europe came from India. You also wanted cinnamon and other spices. There was more wealth leaving the west coast of India than most of Europe had experienced
The other reason is that the Brits REALLY wanted that newfangled tea - first by routing trade from China through the British East India Company, and then by growing tea directly in India itself in the 19th century.
Are you suggesting I should actually read the comments rather than just looking at the pretty pictures before posting? Crazy talk.
As a fellow commenter who doesn’t read the other comments before commenting, i salute this comment.
I know, wild, I’ll try to restrain myself in the future
Without this invasion the world wouldn’t have IPA I guess…
Desire for leaf juice can be very strong when what you have is British cuisine.
There’s three reasons the British conquered half the world:
- British food
- British women
- British weather
Bruh
Hold on, hold on, don’t lump Ireland in with the colonists, they were over here taking what didn’t belong to them long before they made it to India…
Because the Irish definitely didn’t go out to be colonists…
Yeah, good point! The sun never set on the… Irish empire? And all those countries around the world that celebrate independence from Ireland. And gaelige, that worldwide language, spoken in all the former colonies. The Irish museums, full of antiquities rescued from the locals around the world.
They’re really just a shower of bastards with good PR!
Well at least a good few of them went off to colonize America. And didn’t give that one back, either, unlike India and friends.
You could say the same for Wales and Scotland too
Basically it’s all on the French. Us lowly Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t have gone taking over someone else’s country
…
And uh, how did the Angles and Saxons get here when the Celts were already living here? It’s probably all the Roman’s fault for setting a precedent
Explanation: Britain, at one point, managed to leverage itself into a position of control over all of India. In part, this was because the India-based Mughal Empire, one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries on the face of the earth, chose to fall apart at a very inopportune time, splitting India into a hundred different opposing states just as the Brits started sniffing around for colonial concessions.
The other reason is that the Brits REALLY wanted that newfangled tea - first by routing trade from China through the British East India Company, and then by growing tea directly in India itself in the 19th century.
This is a very timely post as I’ve been listening to The Steam House by Jules Vern on LibriVox and it takes place in mid-19th century India having been written in the late-19th century and has entire chapters and passages devoted to the history of Indian colonization to give context. It’s also neat because the book imagines RVs long before RVs were invented and characters correctly predict future technological advances that were still 30-50 years off at the time the book was published
Actually it started with spices, like black pepper.
Then they came with guns and did the “divide and rule” thing, by letting the kings fight each other.
Were there a billion people in India at the time of British colonization?
It highlights the entire subcontinent, but I think even considering that, you’re right, the population was considerably less.
I, I am gonna win! Viva Ragusa!
