Britain Stole $45T from India

Having discussed this with my great grand parents who were born in the early nineteenth century, i am very confident most urban folks and a lot of rural folks in India knew how the British were looting India unlike how it's characterized in the article.

The real challenge was that the concept of "Indian" as an identity wasn't in existence widely till fairly recently - early 1900s of so. India has historically always been a divided society - along cultural/language, caste, tribal and religious lines. There were literally hundreds of small kingdoms and tens of thousands of powerful land owners who paid tributes upwards. Change in the ruling class with invaders taking over which had been happening with a reasonable frequency for thousands of years largely meant a realignment of the system of tributes.

Ironically, I think it's really the centralisation introduced by the highly efficient colonial civil service, the spread of communication systems like railway and telegraph and neutering of the power of kings and regional satraps by the British that allowed first regional identities cutting across caste lines (starting in Maharashtra and Bengal provinces) followed by a more broader national identity to emerge. The sixty odd years it took for the self-rule (later independence) movement to succeed roughly corresponds to the two-three odd generations it took for this national identity to emerge and even then there was sufficient inner division to require partitioning of the country on religious grounds.

This was one of the greatest injustices ever in the history of the world for which reparations have never been made.

Here is a related talk by Dr. Shashi Tharoor on the ways Britain bled India dry - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB5ykS-_-CI