The economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was producing 22.5%. By the peak of the Raj, those figures had more or less been reversed: India was reduced from the world’s leading manufacturing nation to a symbol of famine and deprivation.
author and historian (born 1965)
William Dalrymple (born March 20, 1965) is a Scottish historian, and writer, art historian and curator, as well as a prominent broadcaster and critic. His interests include the history and art of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Middle East, the Muslim world, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Jains and early Eastern Christianity.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Alternative Names:
William Benedict Dalrymple
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William Hamilton-Dalrymple
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William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple
From Wikidata (CC0)
At a time when the British showed no particular enthusiasm for cleanliness, Indian women for example introduced British men to the delights of regular bathing. The fact that the word shampoo is derived from the Hindi word for massage, and that it entered the English language at this time, shows the novelty to the eighteenth-century British of the Indian idea of cleaning hair with materials other than soap. Those who returned home and continued to bathe and shampoo themselves on a regular basis found themselves scoffed at by their less hygienic compatriots: indeed it was a cliché of the time that the British in Bengal had become ‘effeminate’. A few Calcutta men were known to have had themselves circumcised to satisfy the hygienic—and presumably religious—requirements of their Indian wives and companions.