economistbangla.com POP sustainability goals: little sisters outrace big brothers

Among many legacy problems inherited from British Empire across Asia; world war 2 had bankrupt Britain- so many colonies got independence with no transition. Arguably 50 hardest jobs ever pooped up: leading a new nation that had been a colony the day before; weirdly Bangladesh's short straw being assigned to pakistan to lead for 25 yeras 1947-1971 caused the innovation of aid 2.0 from 1971 - the nation's new gov barely had the revenues to organise 10% living in cities and national security : 90% rural peoples were left to networking Bangladesh Rural Advancement Cooperations-fortunatly they united around probably the most qualified and caring chartered accountant 20th C south asia would ever see; he would say it wasnt him but the wmen and those who chose to unite round gifts such as ortal rehydration - he knew where to search for community replicable solutions having been the regional ceo for royal dutch shell until half a million peopke around him were killed by a cyclone and as the work of immediate releif work turned to what next, shell sided with west pakistan army against independence movement- abed flew back to london to sell his putney flat (about 40000$), resign frok shell, and be ready to help with bottom up womens nations building - here are 5 intertgenerational solutions taking half a century to integrate - womens nation building of G1 funance G2 food security G3 health G4 ed G5 massive cooperation women emotional intel and resilience and a segway from centuries of no electricity to 21st C leapfrogging with mobile solar and SDG mapmaking cooperations uniting peoples futures
https://www.economistsocial.com/1971

Purpose Questions from Friends20.com regarding.***Mass Collaborations to UN future summit 2023- are you tech wizard who can help us linkin New York & any other place where citizens demand sustainability for their children? rsvp chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk
Educators needed to help with any of 30 collaborations making alumni of fazle abed the world's largest partnership in future of civil society and womens sustainability goals www.economistwomen.com
do you have any connections with the netherlands- this is where abed's ideas on how bangladesh can share solutions/rural adaptations world needs on climate, and many ways of leapfrog social-business models 1 2 with technology both to end poverty, empower women, maximise middle class, progress both urban and rural youth can find optimal global partners
if you are interested in future of technology - look at this OECD paper -any questions?
** university graduate collaborations are the way to scale futures we need - do you work on 1) ultra poor, 2 playschool 3 anything else brac university and barcelona global university are celebrating worldwide 2022

Can you help us clarify (what Schumacher imagined as) the greatest economic miracle by cataloguing microfranchises and value chains designed round billion poorest village women across Asia; that's the eighth of the human population who raced over last half century to end extreme poverty whose historical "root cause"was how the British Empire had deprived much of Asian continent of access to the machine age that had started glasgow 1760; for 2 centuries access to engineering was mostly distributed where white empires gained...
we start catalogue of 1billiongirls.com with Sir Fazle Abed BA Engineering Glasgow (brac) Bangladesh 1972 to 2019 - some dates are approximate - a date before 1996 means all instruction and people networking was done by word of mouth or by print where literacy existed; definition: by microfranchise we mean a (massively reporiceable) village busienss with positve cash flow however small but 1) so as to minimise risk to franchisee as long as she worked consistently as franchised and where the purpose was for most or all of the value to stay with the local producer; abed was quite happy to design franchises and once proven hand them over to government (because bangladesh began 90% rural the government initially had barely enough to serve citizens and national defences; later its taxation revenue could take over any microfranchise (eg schools) whose cashflow depended partly on grants; abed was always careful not to compete with government but civil society prioritised both rural keynsianism and entrepreneurial revolution by optmising microfranchise design and celebrating sustainable COLLABs;

Giant Leapfroging for womankind: after 1995 some partners brought solar and mobile (digitalisation of global villages meant "you can hear me now" for the first time in quarter of a millennium); also 2001 Abed started a university - at millennium goals parties in silicon valley, he had been asked to share his solutions worldwide...
and So Abed imagined how a university would enable millennials women empowerment to maximally co-create new solutions in line with the Abed/Schumpeter economic model as well as directly action learn how millennials raced to unite the first Sustainability Generation- we welcome corrections -errors are sollely mine chris.macrae@yahoo.uk - to start with 2 notes:probably abed's biggest mistake (which he enetreperenurially turned into a miracle) was spending his life savings on rebuilding 15000 village homes that had been flattened by wae; while sponsor oxfam ranked this as most effective relief project, Abed was mortified; tens of village mothers were dying weekly of starvation; scores of infants of diarrhea; he urgently had to design business solutions solving these local needs; once brac needed a central hub. one of its first operational services was a printing press

MICROFRANCHISE CATALOGUE

sdg2 feed (human beings need clean energy security ie food for all communities; integral to raising life expectancy)
2.1 Rice microfranchise 5+times more village production: Borlaug Green Revolution; Fortunately Quick Start open source knowhow with Chinese Villagers 1970s
2.2 Veggies microfranchise; vitamins especially to prevent stunting infants first 1000 days
2.3 Aarong Village Fare Trade (cash crops eg silks, arts, forestry as early contribution to climate adaptation networking
2.4 Brac Poultry - first total value chain enterprise models- connects 5 village microfranchises - over 1 million jobs
2.5 Brac Dairy -timing investment in powdered milk after EU had stopped dumping
2.6 Up to 14 national agri-enterprise chains designed for poorest inclusion - which 14 agricultures matter most to all your nations farming livelihoods

3 health serve (last mile community mothers networks )
3.1 oral rehydration -ended quarter of infants deaths from diarrhea
3.2 "doordash" 10 basic medicines- micrfranchise 1 para health mom serves same 300 families per week
3.3 vaccination nation
3.4 end tuberculosis -world first methodology
3.5 frugal integration - eg brac wholesales birthing kit at 50 cents and trains midwifes; brac wash sanitation
3.6 James Grant School of Public Health - lead college at Brac Uni

1 finance

4 education - university excepted, village women designed new nation's edu system from scratch -note to nations with century's old education systems
4.1 Village coaching adult microfranchise skilling
4.2 informal primary: world's largest non gov schooling system
4.3 teenage girls livelihood apprentice partnerships -eg with libraries
4.4 university
4.5 designing play schools as worldwide franchise especially emergency/refugee education situations or anywhere community reborn
4.6 education luminaries - every 21st c discipline contribute to millennials as first sustainability generation TF 1 2 3 4 5

5) 100K person COLLAB platforms

2020s next

povertyuni at facebook - fazle abed world record jobs---pro-youth educators ----.HOW DO YOU BUILD ONE DOLLAR HOMES?
IN BANGLADESH 1972 FAZLE ABED COMMUNITIES BUILT 16000 HOMES AT COST OF around A DOLLAR EACH- HERE'S HOW AND HOW ONE MAGICAL ECONOMIC TRICK LED TO ANOTHER UNTIL AN ECONOMIC MODEL SUSTAINING BILLION POOREST WOMEN AND A UNIVERSITY COALITION SHARING THIS KNOWHOW GAVE 2021 YOUTH THE OPPORTUNITY TO BE THE FIRST SUSTAINABILITY GENERATION- how shell ceo applied business to society's greatest needs and socety's values to business' most excitingly human purposes

...macrae family arranged 15 student journalists trip ro bangladesh between xmas 2007 and 2018- our notes were shared with 7 states staging social business competitions in usa, economist editors, adam smith scholars and glasgow u journals - our first visit was to the extraordinary dr yunus so we have logged up notes we have verified in a special section corresponding to 2008 in this blog- we discussed yunus knowhow with 2000 mainly students we gave his book to-- however over our 13 years of visits we became ever more interested in the networks of sir fazle abed which after 50 years of relentless empowerment were at his time of death the world's largest ngo partnership and around which he spent his last 10 years asking his friends to make his legacy the largest open university coalition (30 and counting as of summer 2020) of poverty
Thanks to Sir Fazle Abed of BRAC .. bkash (largest cashless bank) 1 .. and largest partnership NGO In the world: Bangladesh celebrates one of girls and sustainability world's top 3 job creators -BRUN

At BRAC we never met banker for the poor- we met 100000+ educators for poor- see 80th birthday note to Abed: his co-workers thanks

SIR FAZLE ABED BA University Glasgow Naval Architect; 2014 – Honorary Doctor of Laws, Princeton University, US .. 2012 – Doctor of Laws honori causa, University of Manchester, UK … 2010– Honorary degree of Doctor of Laws, University of Bath, UK ...2009 – Honorary Doctorate of Letters, University of Oxford, UK ...2009 – Honorary Doctorate in Humane letters, Rikkyo University, Japan...2008 – Honorary Doctorate of Laws, Columbia University, US...2007 – Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, Yale University, US...2003 – Honorary Doctorate of Education, University of Manchester, UK...1994 – Honorary Doctorate of Laws, Queen's University, Canadaother partnerships - with berkeley us's first research of bangladeshi-american diaspora ….
books on brac -Quiet Revolution (Marty Chen 1983); Freedom From Want (smiley 2009); Driving Development (2016): - downloadable papers 1

Oral Rehydration (Health) Crafts theatre university Best news we free scots have ever heard -48 hours just changed world1000days.world April 2018 is sir fazle abed's 82nd birthday and 1000 days to 2021 - the year china ends poverty, the last decade the UN values human sustainability as possible and how can your will peoples you trust celebrate 2021? China.Japan. Korea. Asean. India. Arctic. Africa. America..1 2 3 4 5 If you can celebrate millennials linking together these 5 Bangladesh-born alumni networks, anything can be possible including economists celebrating how to end poverty,, here are some alumni testimonies brac2.ppt of BRAC @ Bangla - to add rsvp isabella@unacknowledgedgiant.com

Sir Fazle: NB how Industrial era demanded women manage poverty so why not development?curricula of little sister networks: POP, Rice, Nursing, W4E- mobile leapfrogging, open elarning of curricula 7th grade first need to empower livelihoods and sustain community.. people of aliBRAC

Atlanta Nov 2015 will be our 8th year of linking volunteers around this search for Muhammad Yunus- will we make it ? Dunno - we could sure do with some help from educators who want their students to action yunus type dreams and be in the middle of serving post 2015 millennium goals -chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk washington DC 240 316 8157 - you can help us search for millennials job impact networks by hemisphere - eg here's our asia pacific progress - where over half of all millennials live

Calling all educators: serious about preventing extinction generation?

May I suggest it would help to assemble a very small number of reports on what happened between 1843 and 1943- coming from 5 generations of Diaspora scots (all in India on my mothers side) I am concerned with the havoc city of london (birth of international reserve currency) accidentally spun with Glasgow's startup of engines 1760s: in racing to what was the most powerful empire ever seen to the birth of the United Nations- i find the view out of calcutta and the bay of bengal very important to see different cultures/human hopes/Goals from (one quarter of all people were in the british raj east of burma; another quarter were north east through china kora and japan; my father was a teenage navigator out of burma so he had mental maps of that half of the world's human development and of course south east of burma you have the se asian tigers and asean (crossroads to s pacific) miraculously mediated by singapore; thus 2/3 of human sustainability as of end of world war 2 benefited mapping out of Burma (perhaps thats why orwe'll's burmese days and big brother are worth reading side by side by anyone who applies an english mindset to what the heck are we 8 billion beings doing in 2020s) - more on that at www.womensai.com and abedmooc.com

- i have copied this from encylopedia britannica- it seems to important to mediating what is happening in the 2020s not to be able to read it

British raj, period of direct British rule over the Indian subcontinent from 1858 until the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. The raj succeeded management of the subcontinent by the British East India Company, after general distrust and dissatisfaction with company leadership resulted in a widespread mutiny of sepoy troops in 1857, causing the British to reconsider the structure of governance in India. The British government took possession of the company’s assets and imposed direct rule. The raj was intended to increase Indian participation in governance, but the powerlessness of Indians to determine their own future without the consent of the British led to an increasingly adamant national independence movement.

Background

Though trade with India had been highly valued by Europeans since ancient times, the long route between them was subject to many potential obstacles and obfuscations from middlemen, making trade unsafe, unreliable, and expensive. This was especially true after the collapse of the Mongol empire and the rise of the Ottoman Empire all but blocked the ancient Silk Road. As Europeans, led by the Portuguese, began to explore maritime navigation routes to bypass middlemen, the distance of the venture required merchants to set up fortified posts.

The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857

In late March 1857 a sepoy (Indian soldier) in the employ of the East India Company named Mangal Pandey attacked British officers at the military garrison in Barrackpore. He was arrested and then executed by the British in early April. Later in April sepoy troopers at Meerut, having heard a rumour that they would have to bite cartridges that had been greased with the lard of pigs and cows (forbidden for consumption by Muslims and Hindus, respectively) to ready them for use in their new Enfield rifles, refused the cartridges. As punishment, they were given long prison terms, fettered, and put in jail. This punishment incensed their comrades, who rose on May 10, shot their British officers, and marched to Delhi, where there were no European troops. There the local sepoy garrison joined the Meerut men, and by nightfall the aged pensionary Mughal emperor Bahādur Shah II had been nominally restored to power by a tumultuous soldiery. The seizure of Delhi provided a focus and set the pattern for the whole mutiny, which then spread throughout northern India. With the exception of the Mughal emperor and his sons and Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the deposed Maratha peshwa, none of the important Indian princes joined the mutineers. The mutiny officially came to an end on July 8, 1859.

Aftermath of the mutiny

The immediate result of the mutiny was a general housecleaning of the Indian administration. The East India Company was abolished in favour of the direct rule of India by the British government. In concrete terms, this did not mean much, but it introduced a more personal note into the government and removed the unimaginative commercialism that had lingered in the Court of Directors. The financial crisis caused by the mutiny led to a reorganization of the Indian administration’s finances on a modern basis. The Indian army was also extensively reorganized.

Another significant result of the mutiny was the beginning of the policy of consultation with Indians. The Legislative Council of 1853 had contained only Europeans and had arrogantly behaved as if it were a full-fledged parliament. It was widely felt that a lack of communication with Indian opinion had helped to precipitate the crisis. Accordingly, the new council of 1861 was given an Indian-nominated element. The educational and public works programs (roads, railways, telegraphs, and irrigation) continued with little interruption; in fact, some were stimulated by the thought of their value for the transport of troops in a crisis. But insensitive British-imposed social measures that affected Hindu society came to an abrupt end.

Finally, there was the effect of the mutiny on the people of India themselves. Traditional society had made its protest against the incoming alien influences, and it had failed. The princes and other natural leaders had either held aloof from the mutiny or had proved, for the most part, incompetent. From this time all serious hope of a revival of the past or an exclusion of the West diminished. The traditional structure of Indian society began to break down and was eventually superseded by a Westernized class system, from which emerged a strong middle class with a heightened sense of Indian nationalism.

(For more on the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, see also Indian Mutiny and the discussion of the mutiny in India.)

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

British rule

Establishment of direct British governance

Government of India Act of 1858

Much of the blame for the mutiny fell on the ineptitude of the East India Company. On August 2, 1858, Parliament passed the Government of India Act, transferring British power over India from the company to the crown. The merchant company’s residual powers were vested in the secretary of state for India, a minister of Great Britain’s cabinet, who would preside over the India Office in London and be assisted and advised, especially in financial matters, by a Council of India, which consisted initially of 15 Britons, 7 of whom were elected from among the old company’s court of directors and 8 of whom were appointed by the crown. Though some of Britain’s most powerful political leaders became secretaries of state for India in the latter half of the 19th century, actual control over the government of India remained in the hands of British viceroys—who divided their time between Calcutta (Kolkata) and Simla (Shimla)—and their “steel frame” of approximately 1,500 Indian Civil Service (ICS) officials posted “on the spot” throughout British India.

Social policy

On November 1, 1858, Lord Canning (governed 1856–62) announced Queen Victoria’s proclamation to “the Princes, Chiefs and Peoples of India,” which unveiled a new British policy of perpetual support for “native princes” and nonintervention in matters of religious belief or worship within British India. The announcement reversed Lord Dalhousie’s prewar policy of political unification through princely state annexation, and princes were left free to adopt any heirs they desired so long as they all swore undying allegiance to the British crown. In 1876, at the prompting of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria added the title Empress of India to her regality. British fears of another mutiny and consequent determination to bolster Indian states as “natural breakwaters” against any future tidal wave of revolt thus left more than 560 enclaves of autocratic princely rule to survive, interspersed throughout British India, for the entire nine decades of crown rule. The new policy of religious nonintervention was born equally out of fear of recurring mutiny, which many Britons believed had been triggered by orthodox Hindu and Muslim reaction against the secularizing inroads of utilitarian positivism and the proselytizing of Christian missionaries. British liberal socioreligious reform therefore came to a halt for more than three decades—essentially from the East India Company’s Hindu Widow’s Remarriage Act of 1856 to the crown’s timid Age of Consent Act of 1891, which merely raised the age of statutory rape for “consenting” Indian brides from 10 years to 12.

The typical attitude of British officials who went to India during that period was, as the English writer Rudyard Kipling put it, to “take up the white man’s burden.” By and large, throughout the interlude of their Indian service to the crown, Britons lived as super-bureaucrats, “Pukka Sahibs,” remaining as aloof as possible from “native contamination” in their private clubs and well-guarded military cantonments (called camps), which were constructed beyond the walls of the old, crowded “native” cities in that era. The new British military towns were initially erected as secure bases for the reorganized British regiments and were designed with straight roads wide enough for cavalry to gallop through whenever needed. The old company’s three armies (located in Bengal, Bombay [Mumbai], and Madras [Chennai]), which in 1857 had only 43,000 British to 228,000 native troops, were reorganized by 1867 to a much “safer” mix of 65,000 British to 140,000 Indian soldiers. Selective new British recruitment policies screened out all “nonmartial” (meaning previously disloyal) Indian castes and ethnic groups from armed service and mixed the soldiers in every regiment, thus permitting no single caste or linguistic or religious group to again dominate a British Indian garrison. Indian soldiers were also restricted from handling certain sophisticated weaponry.

After 1869, with the completion of the Suez Canal and the steady expansion of steam transport reducing the sea passage between Britain and India from about three months to only three weeks, British women came to the East with ever greater alacrity, and the British officials they married found it more appealing to return home with their British wives during furloughs than to tour India as their predecessors had done. While the intellectual calibre of British recruits to the ICS in that era was, on the average, probably higher than that of servants recruited under the company’s earlier patronage system, British contacts with Indian society diminished in every respect (fewer British men, for example, openly consorted with Indian women), and British sympathy for and understanding of Indian life and culture were, for the most part, replaced by suspicion, indifference, and fear.

Queen Victoria’s 1858 promise of racial equality of opportunity in the selection of civil servants for the government of India had theoretically thrown the ICS open to qualified Indians, but examinations for the services were given only in Britain and only to male applicants between the ages of 17 and 22 (in 1878 the maximum age was further reduced to 19) who could stay in the saddle over a rigorous series of hurdles. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that by 1869 only one Indian candidate had managed to clear those obstacles to win a coveted admission to the ICS. British royal promises of equality were thus subverted in actual implementation by jealous, fearful bureaucrats posted “on the spot.”

Government organization

From 1858 to 1909 the government of India was an increasingly centralized paternal despotism and the world’s largest imperial bureaucracy. The Indian Councils Act of 1861 transformed the viceroy’s Executive Council into a miniature cabinet run on the portfolio system, and each of the five ordinary members was placed in charge of a distinct department of Calcutta’s government—home, revenue, military, finance, and law. The military commander in chief sat with that council as an extraordinary member. A sixth ordinary member was assigned to the viceroy’s Executive Council after 1874, initially to preside over the Department of Public Works, which after 1904 came to be called Commerce and Industry. Though the government of India was by statutory definition the “Governor-General-in-Council” (governor-general remained the viceroy’s alternate title), the viceroy was empowered to overrule his councillors if ever he deemed that necessary. He personally took charge of the Foreign Department, which was mostly concerned with relations with princely states and bordering foreign powers. Few viceroys found it necessary to assert their full despotic authority, since the majority of their councillors usually were in agreement. In 1879, however, Viceroy Lytton (governed 1876–80) felt obliged to overrule his entire council in order to accommodate demands for the elimination of his government’s import duties on British cotton manufactures, despite India’s desperate need for revenue in a year of widespread famine and agricultural disorders.

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st earl of Lytton
Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st earl of Lytton.
From *Forty-One Years in India: From Subaltern to Commander-in-Chief*, by Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar (Frederick Sleigh Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts), 1901

From 1854 additional members met with the viceroy’s Executive Council for legislative purposes, and by the act of 1861 their permissible number was raised to between 6 and 12, no fewer than half of whom were to be nonofficial. While the viceroy appointed all such legislative councillors and was empowered to veto any bill passed on to him by that body, its debates were to be open to a limited public audience, and several of its nonofficial members were Indian nobility and loyal landowners. For the government of India the legislative council sessions thus served as a crude public-opinion barometer and the beginnings of an advisory “safety valve” that provided the viceroy with early crisis warnings at the minimum possible risk of parliamentary-type opposition. The act of 1892 further expanded the council’s permissible additional membership to 16, of whom 10 could be nonofficial, and increased their powers, though only to the extent of allowing them to ask questions of government and to criticize formally the official budget during one day reserved for that purpose at the very end of each year’s legislative session in Calcutta. The Supreme Council, however, still remained quite remote from any sort of parliament.

Economic policy and development

Economically, it was an era of increased commercial agricultural production, rapidly expanding trade, early industrial development, and severe famine. The total cost of the mutiny of 1857–59, which was equivalent to a normal year’s revenue, was charged to India and paid off from increased revenue resources in four years. The major source of government income throughout that period remained the land revenue, which, as a percentage of the agricultural yield of India’s soil, continued to be “an annual gamble in monsoon rains.” Usually, however, it provided about half of British India’s gross annual revenue, or roughly the money needed to support the army. The second most lucrative source of revenue at that time was the government’s continued monopoly over the flourishing opium trade to China; the third was the tax on salt, also jealously guarded by the crown as its official monopoly preserve. An individual income tax was introduced for five years to pay off the war deficit, but urban personal income was not added as a regular source of Indian revenue until 1886.

British merchant ship, Bombay (Mumbai), India
British merchant ship approaching Bombay (Mumbai) Harbour; oil on canvas by J.C. Heard, c. 1850.
© Photos.com/Thinkstock

Despite continued British adherence to the doctrine of laissez-faire during that period, a 10 percent customs duty was levied in 1860 to help clear the war debt, though it was reduced to 7 percent in 1864 and to 5 percent in 1875. The above-mentioned cotton import duty, abolished in 1879 by Viceroy Lytton, was not reimposed on British imports of piece goods and yarn until 1894, when the value of silver fell so precipitously on the world market that the government of India was forced to take action, even against the economic interests of the home country (i.e., textiles in Lancashire), by adding enough rupees to its revenue to make ends meet. Bombay’s textile industry had by then developed more than 80 power mills, and the huge Empress Mill owned by Indian industrialist Jamsetji (Jamshedji) N. Tata (1839–1904) was in full operation at Nagpur, competing directly with Lancashire mills for the vast Indian market. Britain’s mill owners again demonstrated their power in Calcutta by forcing the government of India to impose an “equalizing” 5 percent excise tax on all cloth manufactured in India, thereby convincing many Indian mill owners and capitalists that their best interests would be served by contributing financial support to the Indian National Congress.

Britain’s major contribution to India’s economic development throughout the era of crown rule was the railroad network that spread so swiftly across the subcontinent after 1858, when there were barely 200 miles (320 km) of track in all of India. By 1869 more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km) of steel track had been completed by British railroad companies, and by 1900 there were some 25,000 miles (40,000 km) of rail laid. By the start of World War I (1914–18) the total had reached 35,000 miles (56,000 km), almost the full growth of British India’s rail net. Initially, the railroads proved a mixed blessing for most Indians, since, by linking India’s agricultural, village-based heartland to the British imperial port cities of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, they served both to accelerate the pace of raw-material extraction from India and to speed up the transition from subsistence food to commercial agricultural production. Middlemen hired by port-city agency houses rode the trains inland and induced village headmen to convert large tracts of grain-yielding land to commercial crops.

Large sums of silver were offered in payment for raw materials when the British demand was high, as was the case throughout the American Civil War (1861–65), but, after the Civil War ended, restoring raw cotton from the southern United States to Lancashire mills, the Indian market collapsed. Millions of peasants weaned from grain production now found themselves riding the boom-and-bust tiger of a world-market economy. They were unable to convert their commercial agricultural surplus back into food during depression years, and from 1865 through 1900 India experienced a series of protracted famines, which in 1896 was complicated by the introduction of bubonic plague (spread from Bombay, where infected rats were brought from China). As a result, though the population of the subcontinent increased dramatically from about 200 million in 1872 (the year of the first almost universal census) to more than 319 million in 1921, the population may have declined slightly between 1895 and 1905.

The spread of railroads also accelerated the destruction of India’s indigenous handicraft industries, for trains filled with cheap competitive manufactured goods shipped from England now rushed to inland towns for distribution to villages, underselling the rougher products of Indian craftsmen. Entire handicraft villages thus lost their traditional markets of neighbouring agricultural villagers, and craftsmen were forced to abandon their looms and spinning wheels and return to the soil for their livelihood. By the end of the 19th century a larger proportion of India’s population (perhaps more than three-fourths) depended directly on agriculture for support than at the century’s start, and the pressure of population on arable land increased throughout that period. Railroads also provided the military with swift and relatively assured access to all parts of the country in the event of emergency and were eventually used to transport grain for famine relief as well.

The rich coalfields of Bihar began to be mined during that period to help power the imported British locomotives, and coal production jumped from roughly 500,000 tons in 1868 to some 6,000,000 tons in 1900 and more than 20,000,000 tons by 1920. Coal was used for iron smelting in India as early as 1875, but the Tata Iron and Steel Company (now part of the Tata Group), which received no government aid, did not start production until 1911, when, in Bihar, it launched India’s modern steel industry. Tata grew rapidly after World War I, and by World War II it had become the largest single steel complex in the British Commonwealth. The jute textile industry, Bengal’s counterpart to Bombay’s cotton industry, developed in the wake of the Crimean War (1853–56), which, by cutting off Russia’s supply of raw hemp to the jute mills of Scotland, stimulated the export of raw jute from Calcutta to Dundee. In 1863 there were only two jute mills in Bengal, but by 1882 there were 20, employing more than 20,000 workers.

The most important plantation industries of the era were tea, indigo, and coffee. British tea plantations were started in northern India’s Assam Hills in the 1850s and in southern India’s Nilgiri Hills some 20 years later. By 1871 there were more than 300 tea plantations, covering in excess of 30,000 cultivated acres (12,000 hectares) and producing some 3,000 tons of tea. By 1900 India’s tea crop was large enough to export 68,500 tons to Britain, displacing the tea of China in London. The flourishing indigo industry of Bengal and Bihar was threatened with extinction during the “Blue Mutiny” (violent riots by cultivators in 1859–60), but India continued to export indigo to European markets until the end of the 19th century, when synthetic dyes made that natural product obsolete. Coffee plantations flourished in southern India from 1860 to 1879, after which disease blighted the crop and sent Indian coffee into a decade of decline.

Foreign policy

The northwest frontier

British India expanded beyond its company borders to both the northwest and the northeast during the initial phase of crown rule. The turbulent tribal frontier to the northwest remained a continuing source of harassment to settled British rule, and Pathan (Pashtun) raiders served as a constant lure and justification to champions of the “forward school” of imperialism in the colonial offices of Calcutta and Simla and in the imperial government offices at Whitehall, London. Russian expansion into Central Asia in the 1860s provided even greater anxiety and incentive to British proconsuls in India, as well as at the Foreign Office in London, to advance the frontier of the Indian empire beyond the Hindu Kush mountain range and, indeed, up to Afghanistan’s northern border along the Amu Darya. Lord Canning, however, was far too preoccupied with trying to restore tranquillity within India to consider embarking on anything more ambitious than the northwest frontier punitive expedition policy (commonly called “butcher and bolt”), which was generally regarded as the simplest, cheapest method of “pacifying” the Pathans. As viceroy, Lord Lawrence (governed 1864–69) continued the same border pacification policy and resolutely refused to be pushed or lured into the ever-simmering cauldron of Afghan politics. In 1863, when the popular old emir Dōst Moḥammad Khan died, Lawrence wisely refrained from attempting to name his successor, leaving Dōst Moḥammad’s 16 sons to fight their own fratricidal battles until 1868, when Shīr ʿAlī Khan finally emerged victorious. Lawrence then recognized and subsidized the new emir. The viceroy, Lord Mayo (governed 1869–72), met to confer with Shīr ʿAlī at Ambala in 1869 and, though reaffirming Anglo-Afghan friendship, resisted all requests by the emir for more permanent and practical support for his still precarious regime. Lord Mayo, the only British viceroy killed in office, was assassinated by an Afghan prisoner on the Andaman Islands in 1872.

John Laird Mair Lawrence, 1st Baron Lawrence
John Laird Mair Lawrence, 1st Baron Lawrence.
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The Second Anglo-Afghan War

Russia’s glacial advance into Turkistan sufficiently alarmed Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his secretary of state for India, Robert Salisbury, that by 1874, when they came to power in London, they pressed the government of India to pursue a more vigorous interventionist line with the Afghan government. The viceroy, Lord Northbrook (governed 1872–76), resisting all such cabinet promptings to reverse Lawrence’s noninterventionist policy and to return to the militant posture of the First Anglo-Afghan War era (1839–42), resigned his office rather than accept orders from ministers whose diplomatic judgment he believed to be disastrously distorted by Russophobia. Lord Lytton, however, who succeeded him as viceroy, was more than eager to act as his prime minister desired, and, soon after he reached Calcutta, he notified Shīr ʿAlī that he was sending a “mission” to Kabul. When the emir refused Lytton permission to enter Afghanistan, the viceroy bellicosely declaimed that Afghanistan was but “an earthen pipkin between two metal pots.” He did not, however, take action against the kingdom until 1878, when Russia’s General Stolyetov was admitted to Kabul while Lytton’s envoy, Sir Neville Chamberlain, was turned back at the border by Afghan troops. The viceroy decided to crush his neighbouring “pipkin” and launched the Second Anglo-Afghan War on November 21, 1878, with a British invasion. Shīr ʿAlī fled his capital and country, dying in exile early in 1879. The British army occupied Kabul, as it had in the first war, and a treaty signed at Gandamak on May 26, 1879, was concluded with the former emir’s son, Yaʿqūb Khan. Yaʿqūb Khan promised, in exchange for British support and protection, to admit to his Kabul court a British resident who would direct Afghan foreign relations, but the resident, Sir Louis Cavagnari, was assassinated on September 3, 1879, just two months after he arrived. British troops trudged back over the passes to Kabul and removed Yaʿqūb from the throne, which remained vacant until July 1880, when ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Khan, nephew of Shīr ʿAlī, became emir. The new emir, one of the shrewdest statesmen in Afghan history, remained secure on the throne until his death in 1901.

The viceroy, Lord Lansdowne (governed 1888–94), who sought to reassert a more forward policy in Afghanistan, did so on the advice of his military commander in chief, Lord Roberts, who had served as field commander in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. In 1893 Lansdowne sent Sir Mortimer Durand, the government of India’s foreign secretary, on a mission to Kabul to open negotiations on the delimitation of the Indo-Afghan border. The delimitation, known as the Durand Line, was completed in 1896 and added the tribal territory of the Afrīdīs, Maḥsūds, Wazīrīs, and Swātīs, as well as the chieftainships of Chitral and Gilgit, to the domain of British India. The 9th earl of Elgin (governed 1894–99), Lansdowne’s successor, devoted much of his viceregal tenure to sending British Indian armies on punitive expeditions along the new frontier. The viceroy, Lord Curzon (governed 1899–1905), however, recognized the impracticality of trying to administer the turbulent frontier region as part of the large Punjab province. Thus, in 1901 he created a new North-West Frontier Province (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) containing some 40,000 square miles (about 100,000 square km) of trans-Indus and tribal borderland territory under a British chief commissioner responsible directly to the viceroy. By instituting a policy of regular payments to frontier tribes, the new province reduced border conflicts, though for the next decade British troops continued to fight against Maḥsūds, Wazīrīs, and Zakka Khel Afrīdīs.

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

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