Oh well, the British felt 18th/19th century was an age of decline?
It surely was, for India, where there was anarchy after the fall of the Mughal empire and millions of kingdoms were infighting for power.
However, they mostly were happy about the British pumping huge sums of money into modernizing the country and offering a western education to Indian children for the first time.
+1, you are right about this. Banning these was an undeniably good thing for the Indian society.
> British pumping huge sums of money into modernizing the country and offering a western education to Indian children for the first time
this is a load of BS though. You make it sound like they were there out of their infinite benevolence to do good for the Indians, when in fact they looted the country indiscriminately...