What was the British Raj?

The British Raj — from the Hindi word for 'rule' — was the crown jewel of the British Empire, a vast colonial administration governing roughly one-fifth of the world's population. For nearly ninety years, it shaped the political, economic, and social life of the Indian subcontinent in ways whose legacies remain profoundly visible today.

British involvement in India began with the East India Company in the early 17th century, initially as a trading enterprise. Over two centuries, the Company gradually expanded its territorial control through military conquest, diplomatic manipulation, and exploitation of divisions among Indian rulers. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 — known to the British as the 'Mutiny' and to Indians as the First War of Independence — was a massive uprising that shook British confidence in Company rule. In its aftermath, the British Crown assumed direct control in 1858, establishing the Raj.

The Raj was an elaborate system of colonial governance. A small number of British administrators — never more than about 100,000 in a country of 300 million — ruled through a combination of bureaucratic efficiency, military force, strategic alliances with Indian princes and elites, and the deliberate cultivation of divisions along religious, caste, and linguistic lines. The Indian Civil Service, railways, telegraph system, English-language education, and legal codes were all tools of imperial control, even when they also brought material benefits.

Economically, the Raj was extractive. India served as a source of raw materials — cotton, jute, tea, indigo, opium — and a captive market for British manufactured goods. Indian textile manufacturing, once the finest in the world, was deliberately undermined to benefit British factories. Famines killed tens of millions of Indians during the Raj, while grain continued to be exported. British investment in railways and infrastructure primarily served the needs of extraction and military control rather than Indian development.

The struggle against the Raj produced one of history's most remarkable liberation movements. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, evolved from a moderate reform organization into a mass movement for independence. Under Mahatma Gandhi's leadership from the 1920s, nonviolent resistance — salt marches, boycotts, civil disobedience — mobilized millions and exposed the moral bankruptcy of colonial rule. Independence came on August 15, 1947, but was accompanied by the traumatic Partition that created India and Pakistan, killing up to two million people and displacing 15 million in one of history's largest mass migrations.