The British Rule in India
Marx’s two most famous articles on colonialism, written in English for the New-York Daily Tribune in 1853: British rule as the destroyer of India’s village communities and handicrafts — “the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia” — and, in the second, its “double mission,” destructive and regenerating, through railways, industry and political unity, with a denunciation of the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois-civilization.”
- Edition
- New-York Daily Tribune, 25 June and 8 August 1853 (written in English); text rebuilt from the Library of Congress scans
- Source
- Library of Congress, Chronicling America
Start reading 34 min audiobook
Quiz
Test your reading. The short quiz draws 10 questions at random from 32; score 80% for a silver medal. The full quiz asks all 32; a perfect score earns gold.
Contents
- I The British Rule in India (25 June 1853) 18 min 15
Written during the Commons debate on renewing the East India Company’s charter. Marx rejects the idea of a golden age before the British, but argues that British rule has done something different in kind from earlier conquests: it has broken the whole framework of Indian society. In Asia, he claims, government had only three departments — plunder at home, plunder abroad and public works, above all irrigation — while society rested on self-sufficient villages uniting agriculture and handicraft. The British neglected the public works, and British cotton goods and steam destroyed the hand-loom and the spinning-wheel, dissolving the village communities. Marx condemns the suffering this caused, but refuses to mourn the villages, which he calls the foundation of Oriental despotism, caste and superstition. England, whatever its crimes and motives, was the “unconscious tool of history” in bringing about Asia’s only social revolution — and he closes with Goethe’s verse justifying torment by its results.
- II The Future Results of British Rule in India (8 August 1853) 16 min 16
Marx asks what British rule will leave behind. India, he argues, has no history of its own beyond successive conquests; the question is only which conqueror. Britain has a “double mission”: to destroy the old Asiatic society and to lay the material foundations of Western society in Asia — political unity, the telegraph, a native army, a free press, private property in land, an educated class, and above all railways, built to serve the Lancashire “millocracy” but bound to bring modern industry, which will dissolve caste. Yet the Indians will not reap the benefits until either the British working class takes power or the Indians themselves throw off the English yoke. The article ends with a denunciation of the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois-civilization,” naked in the colonies, and the image of progress as a pagan idol drinking from the skulls of the slain until a social revolution masters the world market.