Do You Agree with the View That in the Period 1900 to 1919 the British Only Made Concessions to India in Order to Strengthen Their Hold on the Sub Continent?

1690 Words7 Pages
Between 1900 and 1919 there were many reforms made by the British which concerned the ruling of Indian within the empire. During this time there was difficulty concerning the nationalist movement in India. The reforms were made for individual reasons however the reforms may have been for various main reasons. There are arguments that Britain were only making reforms to ensure control over India, this is shown in source 13, this is where the British only decided to reform to help themselves and not India as a whole. But the reforms can also be seen as reducing British rule over the subcontinent as in sources 14 and 15 where they are either to grant India nationhood or to reduce tensions between the nationalist movement and the British Raj. Throughout the sources there is a sense that the concessions were only used as a form of control of the Indian people. In source 13 there is a strong feeling that the British reforms were a way of keeping control over India. For example the Morley-Minto reforms were “a way of strengthening the Raj” and therefore British rule over India. This corresponds to source 15 which mentions the “machinery of British rule” this agrees with the idea of the concessions only being made to allow further British control because there is a set of cogs that all need to work and India needs to be running smoothly in the British eyes to allow maximum profit from the ventures. India was the home of the cotton industry and tea and indigo was taken and sold by the British from India to keep Britain which allowed Britain to remain at highest economic prosperity. The cotton industry in England relied heavily on that in India not only was the economy at risk in Britain so was work. Without control in India this would have been lost so the reforms that were made such as the Morley Minto were aimed at keeping India under British control. These were not

More about Do You Agree with the View That in the Period 1900 to 1919 the British Only Made Concessions to India in Order to Strengthen Their Hold on the Sub Continent?

Open Document