The Days of The Raj:
From medieval times to modern times, British sailed to various parts of the world to colonise and rule it in the name of the Crown.
The most precious colony of Great Britain was India, which British pioneers and colonisers ruled, had good times and memories and earned their fortunes. At any given time, a mere 450,000 Britishers were in India as rulers, administrators, (businessmen, employees and family members). With their "divide and rule" policy they managed to rule a subcontinent consisting of present day, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan.
This subcontinent consisted of around 525 Maharajas, Rajas, Nawabs and other princes and the British Crown kept their kingdoms and principalities knitted together by having a British Resident or Officer posted in each kingdom, directly reporting to the Viceroy about the developments in their kingdoms.
In the year 1600, Queen Elizabeth I signed a Royal Charter empowering the East India Company of England to travel east to conduct business with countries in that part of the world. Subsequently, in 1608 the members of the East India Company arrived and docked their ships at Surat, India and by 1612 had set up a foothold. Thereafter, they waged power struggles with foreign powers already in India and managed to set up trading posts and factories in various cities of the Indian subcontinent. By the end of the 17th century the British had consolidated their power and started ruling the natives, as Indians were referred to by them.
“The sun shall never set over the British Empire” and “Britannia, Britannia rules the waves; never, never shall it be a slave,” where the statements repeated often by India’s colonial rulers in a bygone era. Great Britain, the seafaring nation and world’s strongest naval power till early 1940s, colonized many parts of the world, tenaciously holding its colonies till the end of World War II, when enormous war debts, losses in lives and property, etc. forced it to relinquish its colonies one-by-one by granting them independence.
Today, London is a city of museums containing priceless antiques and rare pieces of historical importance shipped from different colonies they once ruled. There are many museums and there is plenty to see and if a visitor was to see and study the artifacts, exhibits and items of historical importance quite seriously, then he could not visit all museums in a calendar year.
India was Britain’s prime colony because this vast subcontinent was a chief source of raw materials to it, as well as a massive market for its manufactured goods. Raw cotton was shipped from India to the mills in England, turned into textiles and shipped back to the markets of India.
Most English young men, educated in public schools and imbued with the spirit of adventure, ambition and thought of the future, preferred India over other colonies and opted for either civil service or military careers, because of good pay, status and attractive living facilities.
Like the caste system prevalent in India then, the British in India had their watertight social divisions in the form of class system, viz. civil service, military, box-wallahs (a jargon used those days to describe British who had succeeded in business) and missionaries. Civil servants were on the topmost rung of the social ladder, followed by military, and then came the box-wallahs and missionaries occupied the lowest rung.
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