Less well-known is the crucial impact of urban strikes by the Indian working class, alongside mutinies by soldiers and sailors that dealt the death blow to the Raj.Īlongside these misconceptions stands the prevalent notion that British rule in India was generally benevolent and somehow a nicer version of imperialism than that practised by other European powers. Thanks to the lasting influence of Richard Attenborough 1982 film Gandhimost in the West perceive the movement for independence as being led primarily by the Mahatma and his largely rural-based protest movement. The historical reality is that the sectarian divide that mutilated the fight for Indian independence had been consciously encouraged by the British for decades and that the struggle to overthrow the Raj had witnessed numerous examples of multi-faith unity that could have averted the disaster of 1947. The dominant view for the apologists of empire is that partition was inevitable as the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority had proved themselves incapable of living together in an independent state without British supervision. The hitherto single state of India, as ruled by the British Raj, was torn in two amid ferocious communal violence that caused up to a million deaths and saw another 15 million displaced. The celebration will be tempered by bitterness, however, at the price of their respective freedoms. The peoples of India and Pakistan will rightfully recall a vast movement of insurgency that climaxed in 1947 to throw off the yoke of two centuries of imperialist plunder by the British Empire. ![]() The two dominant nation-states of South Asia will celebrate 70 years of independence on 14/15 August. The near-collapses of the pound, the country’s government bond market, and its pension system are likely to echo around the world in several unexpected ways.Contrary to the rose-tinted view of decolonisation, the end of British rule in India was marked by blunder and duplicity, writes Sean Ledwith And the run against Britain’s most aggressive mortgage lender, Northern Rock, in September 2007, became a template for the global financial crisis a year later.īritain has just suffered its latest financial convulsion. The breakup of the European exchange-rate mechanism on “Black Wednesday” in September 1992 forced France, Italy, Spain, and Greece to accept Germany’s economic dominance of Europe. ![]() Britain’s IMF bailout in September 1976 discredited Keynesian economics and led to the election of Margaret Thatcher, inspiring the monetarist revolution of Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan. The second postwar sterling devaluation, in November 1967, triggered a chain reaction that culminated in US President Richard Nixon dismantling the Bretton Woods currency system in 1971. The sterling devaluation of September 1949 ended postwar hopes of a genuinely multilateral currency system and confirmed the dollar’s hegemony. Roughly every 15 years since the 1930s, Britain has experienced an autumn financial crisis and policy regime change that has foreshadowed global upheavals a few years later.īritain abandoned the gold standard in September 1931 the United States followed in 1933. ![]() LONDON – As the world’s policymakers gather in Washington for the International Monetary Fund’s Annual Meetings, there is a historical curiosity to consider.
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