India: Playground of Empire

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The initial British interest in the Indian subcontinent revolved around trade.4 The moneymaking opportunities that India provided attracted the attention of British businessmen looking to make their fortune and motivated by a desire for adventure. They would decide to leave England to live out their lives in untamed and barbaric India. Not only were they motivated by the prospect of creating a fortune, but also by the responsibility that they believed they had as Christians and members of the “British race”. Rudyard Kipling wrote his essay The White Man’s Burden; in which he outlinedthe British mentality regarding their racial superiority. “The responsibility for governing India” Kipling claimed, “has been placed by the inscrutable decree of providence upon the shoulders of the British race.”2 This statement represents the general understanding of the British people regarding their right to rule. It was this mentality that allowed the colonial governments to treat the indigenous people like savages that had to be controlled. The response to the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, during which Hindu and Muslim soldiers rose up against their British commanding officers, consisted of strapping the imprisoned mutineers to the muzzles of loaded cannons and touching the guns off, a particularly barbaric method of execution by British standards. These killings illustrate the disdain with which the colonial rulers dealt with the ruled.5 As a result of what are now considered by many to be British atrocities, the academic analysis of this period is often focused on British wrongdoing as well as the oppressed colonized without taking a close look at the Britons who were living out their lives and doing business in the colonies. For them, especially in the period from 1850 to 1914, India was not a place to make a fortune, but instead to escape the safe and somewhat dull lives in England in favor of a hazardous and alien playground where a well-to-do Englishman and his family could live a life of indulgence and danger all for the glory of Great Britain.

To the young Britons who lived in India, the colony was more than just a source of money. India represented all that was great and good about British colonial rule. Their interest was not only monetary, but nationalistic; they wanted to be a part of the history of England in all of its greatness. The young European men who elected to spend their lives in India were not driven by money, but by glory and adventure.