ब्रिटिश ईस्ट इंडिया कंपनी की स्थापना ३१ दिसम्बर १६०० ईस्वी में हुई थी। इसे यदाकदा जॉन कंपनी के नाम से भी जाना जाता था। इसे ब्रिटेन की महारानी ने भारत के साथ व्यापार करने के लिये २१ सालो तक की छूट दे दी। बाद में कम्पनी ने भारत के लगभग सभी क्षेत्रों पर अपना सैनिक तथा प्रशासनिक अधिपत्य जमा लिया। 1858 में इसका विलय हो गया।
East India Company
In 1757 Mir Jafar,
the commander in chief of the army of the Nawab of Bengal,
along with Jagat Seth,
Maharaja Krishna Nath, Umi Chand and some others, secretly connived with the
British, asking support to overthrow the Nawab in return for trade grants. The
British forces, whose sole duty until then was guarding Companyproperty, were
numerically inferior to the Bengali
armed forces. At the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757, fought between the
British under the command of Robert Clive and the Nawab, Mir Jafar's forces betrayed
the Nawab and helped defeat him. Jafar was installed on the throne as a British
subservient ruler.
The battle transformed British perspective as they realised their strength and
potential to conquer smaller Indian kingdoms and marked the beginning of the
imperial or colonial era.
An 1876 political
cartoon of Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) making Queen Victoria
Empress of India.
The caption was "New crowns for old ones!"
British policy in
Asia during the 19th century was chiefly concerned with expanding and
protecting its hold on India, viewed as its most important colony and the key
to the rest of Asia.The East India Company drove the expansion of the British Empire
in Asia. The company's army had first joined forces with the Royal Navy
during the Seven Years' War, and the two continued to cooperate in
arenas outside India: the eviction of Napoleon from Egypt (1799),
the capture of Java from
the Netherlands (1811), the acquisition of Singapore (1819) and Malacca
(1824), and the defeat of Burma (1826).
From its base in India, the company had also
been engaged in an increasingly profitable opium export
trade to China since the 1730s. This trade, unlawful in China since it was
outlawed by the Qing dynasty in 1729, helped reverse the trade
imbalances resulting from the British imports of tea, which saw large outflows
of silver from Britain to China. In 1839, the confiscation by the Chinese
authorities at Canton of 20,000 chests of opium led Britain to attack
China in the First Opium War, and the seizure by Britain of the
island of Hong Kong, at that time a minor settlement.
The British had
direct or indirect control over all of present-day India before the middle of
the 19th century. In 1857, a local rebellion by an army of sepoys escalated
into the Rebellion of 1857, which took six months to suppress
with heavy loss of life on both sides. The trigger for the Rebellion has been a
subject of controversy. The resistance, although short-lived, was triggered by
British East India Company attempts to expand its control of India. According
to Olson, several reasons may have triggered the Rebellion. For example, Olson
concludes that the East India Company's attempt to annexe and expand its direct
control of India, by arbitrary laws such as Doctrine of Lapse, combined with
employment discrimination against Indians, contributed to the 1857 Rebellion.The East India Company officers lived like princes, the company finances were
in shambles, and the company's effectiveness in India was examined by the
British crown after 1858. As a result, the East India Company lost its powers
of government and British India formally came under direct British rule,
with an appointed Governor-General of India. The East India Company was
dissolved the following year in 1858. A few years later, Queen Victoria
took the title of Empress of India.
India suffered a
series of serious crop failures in the late 19th century, leading to widespread famines
in which at least 10 million people died. The East India Company had failed to
implement any coordinated policy to deal with the famines during its period of
rule. This changed during the Raj,
in which commissions were set up after each famine to investigate the causes
and implement new policies, which took until the early 1900s to have an effect.
The slow but momentous reform movement
developed gradually into the Indian Independence Movement. During the years of World War I,
the hitherto bourgeois "home-rule" movement was transformed into a
popular mass movement by Mahatma Gandhi, a pacifist.
Apart from Gandhi, other revolutionaries such as Shaheed Bhagat Singh,
Chandrashekar Azad and Subhas Chandra Bose, were not against use of violence to
oppose the British rule. The independence movement attained its objective with
the independence of Pakistan and India on 14 and 15 August 1947 respectively.
Conservative
elements in England consider the independence of India to be the moment that
the British Empire
ceased to be a world power, following Curzon's
dictum that, "[w]hile we hold on to India, we are a first-rate power. If
we lose India, we will decline to a third-rate power."
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