An Era of Darkness

In 1930, the American historian and philosopher Will Durant wrote that Britain?s ?conscious and deliberate bleeding of India? [was the] greatest crime in all history?. He was not the only one to denounce the rapacity and cruelty of British rule, and his assessment was not exaggerated. Almost thirty-five million Indians died because of acts of commission and omission by the British?in famines, epidemics, communal riots and wholesale slaughterike the reprisal killings after the 1857 War of Independence and the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Besides the deaths of Indians, British rule impoverished India in a manner that beggars belief. When the East India Company took control of the country, in the chaos that ensued after the collapse of the Mughal empire, India?s share of world GDP was 23 percent. When the Britisheft it was just above 3 percent. The British empire in India began with the East India Company, incorporated in 1600, by royal charter of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I, to trade in