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History Optional PYQ Master Pack · Model answer

The Indian Middle Class firmly believed that “Britain had imposed a colonial economy on India which had impoverished the country.” Comment.

  • UPSC 1999
  • Economic Impact of British Colonial Rule

By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, India's Western-educated middle class had moved from early faith in British tutelage to a hardened, structural indictment of colonial economic policy.

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What the full answer covers

  • From Trust to Disillusionment
  • The Drain of Wealth as the Core Indictment
  • Deindustrialisation and the "Ruralisation" of the Economy
  • Land Revenue, Commercialisation and Rural Exaction
  • Railways, Free Trade and Subordinated Infrastructure
  • How Far Was the Belief Vindicated? A Historiographical Note

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