For over three hundred years the Indian subcontinent was tightly managed a Western superpower. Following World War II, England was simply unequipped with the resources necessary to keep the great British Empire together, reluctantly giving sovereignty to many of its colonies, including the “jewel in Britain’s Imperial crown,” India. (Kaul, 2011) A precursor for the disastrous decolonization of Africa, the British government divided up its Southern Asia holdings by religious majority, without taking into account the full scale of placing borders on a map; they displaced more than fourteen million people. (Bharadwaj, 2008) The Partition of India was a devastating event, with horrible violence occurring between the new states, Pakistan and India. However, to view the conflict most effectively, one must see it from the point of view of the British Monarchy and its subjects, the people of India.
Since the year 1600 and the establishment of the East India Company, the British have had a hold in India, siphoning its resources to fuel the mercantile ideology. With several hundred million people, India was ripe for the taxing, and that is exactly what the British Raj did. Economist Angus Madison’s statistics on India show that India’s share in the world economy declined from 27% when the English arrived, to just 3% in 1950. (Madison, 2003) This shows just how much the British took from the citizens of India; they arrived in a flourishing, tremendously wealthy nation and transformed it into the recovering third-world country that it is today. It is difficult to comprehend how valuable India was in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Viceroy of British India, Lord George Curzon once said, “We could lose all our dominions and still survive, but if we lost India, our sun would sink to its setting.” (What Life Was Like, 1999) This quotation proved to be true; the era of decline for Britain coincided with the loss of India.
There were several reasons for the decolonization of...