Engines of Exploitation: Why Building Railways Does Not Justify Colonialism

There is an permanent discussion about colonialism that boils down to an infamous point: “Oh, but the British gave India railways!” While I will stick to the case of India, this kind of debate refers to any brand of colonialism. Should we defend any colonial rule, or at least defend it partially, because of technological progress it brought to a country or a region? A short reply is – no.

The simple reason for this is that colonialism was a model of exploitation. In the 19th century, the core formula was to extract natural resources from a colony for as little cost as possible, process the resources in the country of the colonizers, and sell the final product for as much profit as possible. Thus, it was the industry of the colonizing country that was to prosper, not that of the colony. 

This is certainly true for British colonialism in India where most of heavy industry was not introduced to India – it developed primarily in England, while India was made to provide the raw resources for that industrial giant. The textile industry is a primary example of this: India provided the cotton, England produced clothes.

The “British gave India railways”point first of all avoids any discussion of what the British did not give to India. It also ignores the fact that India, like all other colonies, was exploited, and that the final bill was a deficit for the Indian economy when colonialism ended. The fact that the British left railways and other elements of infrastructure behind with this bill does not change the overall equation that results in a negative sum. 

In the 19th century, heavy industry became much more important for developed economies than agriculture. Since the British were not shifting their heavy industry to India, for the obvious reasons of their own benefit calculations, they were actually holding India back from progress, rather than allowing or enabling greater progress. Another Asian country, Japan, progressed much faster than India in the last stages of 19th century colonialism, because, not being colonized and instead becoming a colonizer, Japan was able to build and model its industry in its own way.

Second, the railways themselves were at first a tool of this colonial economic formula, rather than a graceful gift of a benevolent power. Yes, the very first passenger railway line to be opened in the whole of Asia was a Bombay-Thane connection in western India, commenced in 1853 and built by the British. But it must be pointed out that despite turning out to be a successful passenger freight connection from the very start, it was meant to be an experiment, a trial run for railway construction in a different environment. It was only because this experiment proved to be economically profitable, rather than being seen as a service for common people, that more passenger lines were established.

Before that connection was opened, the very first railway tracks to be laid in India served the purpose of transporting things, rather than people: The first train operated in Madras presidency in 1830s for the purpose of moving granite stones. 

Even after the Bombay-Thane line opened, the next few railway lines to be built in India were meant to serve two main purposes of the colonial model: moving resources and moving soldiers. After Bombay-Thane there came the Bombay-Pune and then Bombay-Pune-Ahmednagar line, which connected one of the biggest cities in India and its most vibrant port (Bombay) with two garrison cities (Pune and Ahmednagar). 

In eastern India, the very first line to be opened was Calcutta-Rajhamal, which connected another major port and the capital of British India (Calcutta) with the coal mines of Rajmahal. In time, railway lines were extended under British rule to connect major cities, not just strategic ports, garrisons, and resource areas, but this was simply because the railways proved to yield a lot of profit for the companies operating them.

A counterpoint to the all of the above may be that only some raw materials were being processed in Britain. Indeed, the roots of colonialism grow out from the spice trade era. Spices were final goods: their processing, such as drying of flower buds to obtain cloves, took place in non-European territories and European ships would come to obtain the final product. The Europeans first traded with such spice-producing countries and then overpowered them militarily, turning them into colonies, but the processing was still taking part at the source. This was, however, simply because the European environment did not allow for the growing of such plants at scale. 

Had there been a chance to shift the cultivation to the Old Continent, the Europeans would have certainly done so. This happened with silkworms, taken from China and introduced in parts of Europe, such as Italy, to produce silk. In the 19th century, the British even tried to introduce Kashmiri pashm goats, famous for their wool, to other habitats, but failed (as described in Kyle J. Gardner’s “The Frontier Complex”). 

Whenever it was not possible to copy the cultivation into Europe, it was being copied to other colonies where a given plant could grow, as it happened with Myristica fragrans trees, once found only in Maluku Islands (in what is now eastern Indonesia), from which cloves are obtained. These were successfully introduced in other regions, such as Latin America. Similarly, tea was introduced in India from China in the 19th century – not because the British loved their Indian subjects so much but because certain hilly areas of India provided the right environment. Running plantations in a British colony, rather than purchasing tea from China, meant even more profit, as tea became increasingly popular in Europe. 

In this discussion it is the economic model of colonialism in the 19th century that we’re considering; this is when the the railways were built. While 19th century colonies had plantations and fields, the colonizing countries had factories.

If we really are to look for a case of a positive legacy of colonialism – not to whitewash it, but to set the facts straight – then democracy in India would be one of the very few such instances. Contrary to railways, democracy was not introduced for the economic benefit of British masters. But this is also why, contrary to railways, it was introduced in such a piecemeal way, hesitantly, and only in the last decades of colonial rule. In hindsight, its introduction represented the gradual process of the colonial power conceding more and more power to Indians, simply because the colonial power was in decline, and felt pressed to do so – not because the British wanted to share their best solutions with the world.

While some have argued that democracy was actually an ancient Indian creation, rather than a British gift, it must be admitted that here there is no evidence for this. While there are claims that an ancient form of Indian polity, a japanada, was a tribal republic, historians like Romila Thapar have pointed out that this is a mistranslation. Janapadas were clan territories in which (probably) a group of prominent men ruled the rest, as was common for tribes and early states before monarchies became the dominant form of rule. But this unfortunately does not prove that such leaders were chosen through a vote. It must be conceded that democracy, as a modern form of government, was indeed introduced to India by the British.

Yet, let us remember that at the end of colonial rule in India in 1947, the democratic franchise was covering only “a little more than 30 million people, about one-fifth of the population” (as pointed by Ornit Shani in “How India Became Democratic.”) It was independent India that extended this franchise in one sweeping reform to the entire adult population before the first elections. 

Shani’s excellent, painstaking work, based on historical archives, also proves that the fact that democracy took roots in the country was a success of the first administration in independent India. It was this administration, rather than the colonial one, that worked hard to extend the franchise to all citizens, to teach them about this new system, and to convince them why it was being introduced for their own good. 

Thus, while India cannot lay claim to creating an ancient democracy, it can certainly lay a claim to radically extending, stabilizing, and retaining a modern democratic system while so many other Asian countries failed for decades after colonialism ended to do so. There is a reason why at the point of British departure from India the railway network covered vast parts of the country while the right to vote only covered a smaller part of the population: because the former offered economic benefits to the colonial overlords, and the latter did not.