Here are some interesting facts about “benign” British rule in India:

In 1900, the average per capita annual income in various countries was as follows:

U.S.  –     $220

U.K. –     $180

France – $156

Germany – $124

Holland –  $110

Norway – $100

Austria –  $84

Italy  –    $80

Spain –  $80

Russia – $55

Belgium –  $14  (?)

British India – $5

(Source: William Digby, ” ‘Prosperous’ British India: A Revelation From Official Records,” 1901, cited by Taraknath Das in “Young India’s Reply to Count Tolstoi, Part III” in  The Twentieth Century Magazine, Volume 2.)

This was a decline from $9 per capita yearly income only 20 years earlier.

That is, Indian incomes were halved during just 20 years of British imperial rule.

The cause was glaringly evident – the huge tribute paid every year to the British, amounting to $175 million dollars.

(Source: Rev. J. T. Sunderland in “The Causes of Famine in India.”)

The tribute was only the latest form of plunder.

In just over half a century after The Battle of Plassey in 1757, the British plundered between $2.5 billion and $5 billion from Indian peasantry.

While the Russian Czar only took 1/10th of the produce of his Eurasian subjects and allowed for variations in production, the British took 20% of the production and made no allowance for failures of crops and natural disasters. Poor peasants paid as much as 65% of their net income in land revenue.

All told, there were more famines in India under British rule than in all the centuries before under Muslim rule.

British writers themselves pointed out that Britain’s “famine relief” programs were paid from taxes on the Indians themselves so that it was a matter of taxing the starving to feed the dying.

(Source: “The Causes of the Present Discontent in India,” C. J. O’Donnell.)

While famines under previous rulers had struck at the rate of roughly 1 in 50 years, under the British, they struck every 9 years and their toll in numbers was much higher. They also affected a much larger area.

In just 40 years between 1870 and 1910, famine took the lives of 30 million Indians.

(“The British Empire and Famine in Late 19th Century Central India,” Laxman S. Satya).

As for the total number of “avoidable deaths” through out the two centuries of British empire, estimates run into the hundreds of millions, and at an upper end, the figure of over a billion.  This, not the racist fantasies of propagandists like Jean Raspail, is genocide and race war:

British-ruled India provides the most appalling example of imperial lies in a quantitative sense. For two and a half centuries every British schoolchild has been told the dreadful but substantially fictional “story” of the Black Hole of Calcutta – how in 1756 the ruler of Bengal incarcerated 146 British prisoners (including a woman) in a small cell overnight and in the morning only 23 (including the woman) had survived. This story demonized the Indians, victims for two centuries of genocidal British rule in South Asia (1757-1947) – whilst the appalling rapacious taxation, famine and commerce-spread disease in British India has been substantially deleted from British history.

The horrendous “forgotten history” of British-ruled India commenced with the Great Bengal Famine in rapaciously over-taxed Bengal in 1769/1770 (10 million victims or one third of the population dying) and almost concluded with the World War 2 man-made Bengal Famine (which peaked in 1943/1944, took 4 million victims, was accompanied by horrendous sexual abuse of huge numbers of starving women and was very likely due to a deliberate “scorched earth” British war-time strategy to prevent Japanese invasion of India). [1] In between these 2 disasters a succession of appalling famines killed scores of millions; mercantile spread of epidemic diseases such as plague and cholera killed millions; and grinding poverty from British taxation was such that the annual death rate before 1920 was about 4.8%, falling to a still genocidal value of 3.5 % in 1947. The current annual death rate in India nearly 60 years after independence is about 0.9% – a huge improvement but still about 3 times greater than what it should be.”