Popular belief, back in the nineteenth century and also today, was that the British Empire in India may have been flawed and imperfect, but it set out to benefit the native peoples. In this episode, we take a look at that belief, and find that actually it did a great deal of damage, that the benefit it might have produced was already being pursued by local figures who might have got a lot further left to their own devices, and that it deliberately sacrificed Indian economic interests for the sake of British ones.

Nowhere was that truer than in the cotton industry.

Illustration: Man's Indian Calico robe from the late seventeenth century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: http://metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/140005504

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License