5 of the worst atrocities carried out by the British Empire
A YouGov poll found 43 per cent of Brits thought the British Empire was a good thing, while 44 per cent were proud of Britain's history of colonialism
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The Independent
A new YouGov poll has found the British public are generally proud of the British Empire and its colonial past.
YouGov found 44 per cent were proud of Britain's history of colonialism, with 21 per cent regretting it happened and 23 per cent holding neither view.
The same poll also found 43 per cent believed the British Empire was a good thing, 19 per cent said it was bad and 25 per cent said it was "neither".
Read more British people are proud of colonialism and the British Empire - poll
At its height in 1922, the British empire governed a fifth of the world's population and a quarter of the world's total land area.
Although the proponents of Empire say it brought various economic developments to parts of the world it controlled, critics point to massacres, famines and the use of concentration camps by the British Empire.
1. Boer concentration camps
Armed Afrikaners on the veldt near Ladysmith during the second Boer War, circa 1900
During the Second Boer War (1899-1902), the British rounded up around a sixth of the Boer population - mainly women and children - and detained them in camps, which were overcrowded and prone to outbreaks of disease, with scant food rations.
Of the 107,000 people interned in the camps, 27,927 Boers died, along with an unknown number of black Africans.
2. Amritsar massacre
A young visitor looks at a painting depicting the Amritsar Massare at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar
When peaceful protesters defied a government order and demonstrated against British colonial rule in Amritsar, India, on 13 April 1919, they were blocked inside the walled Jallianwala Gardens and fired upon by Gurkha soldiers.
The soldiers, under the orders of Brigadier Reginald Dyer, kept firing until they ran out of ammunition, killing between 379 and 1,000 protesters and injuring another 1,100 within 10 minutes.
Brigadier Dyer was later lauded a hero by the British public, who raised £26,000 for him as a thank you.
3. Partitioning of India
British lawyer and law lord Cyril Radcliffe, 1st Viscount Radcliffe (1899 - 1977) at the Colonial Office, London, July 1956
In 1947, Cyril Radcliffe was tasked with drawing the border between India and the newly created state of Pakistan over the course of a single lunch.
After Cyril Radcliffe split the subcontinent along religious lines, uprooting over 10 million people, Hindus in Pakistan and Muslims in India were forced to escape their homes as the situation quickly descended into violence.
Some estimates suggest up to one million people lost their lives in sectarian killings.
4. Mau Mau Uprising
Mau Mau suspects at one of the prison camps in 1953
Thousands of elderly Kenyans, who claim British colonial forces mistreated, raped and tortured them during the Mau Mau Uprising (1951-1960), have launched a £200m damages claim against the UK Government.
Members of the Kikuyu tribe were detained in camps, since described as "Britain's gulags" or concentration camps, where they allege they were systematically tortured and suffered serious sexual assault.
Estimates of the deaths vary widely: historian David Anderson estimates there were 20,000, whereas Caroline Elkins believes up to 100,000 could have died.
5. Famines in India
Starving children in India, 1945
British people are proud of colonialism and the British Empire - poll
Between 12 and 29 million Indians died of starvation while it was under the control of the British Empire, as millions of tons of wheat were exported to Britain as famine raged in India.
In 1943, up to four million Bengalis starved to death when Winston Churchill diverted food to British soldiers and countries such as Greece while a deadly famine swept through Bengal.
Talking about the Bengal famine in 1943, Churchill said: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...-war-concentration-camp-mau-mau-a6821756.html
Short answer, yes the empire was cruel. The arguments you’re raising are not valid at all. You perhaps do not know but in 1947, the subcontinent was much much poorer compared to both today and compared to pre-colonial times (relative to the rest of the world).
I don’t often quote Indian politicians, but have a look at this clip of Shashi Tharoor that went viral at the Oxford Union:
He is one of best erudite politicians that India has produced.
Inglorious Empire: what the British did to India
Book review: Shashi Tharoor’s angry history of British rule in India is a timely response to empire nostalgia
Private army: the East India Company had 260,000 soldiers at the start of the 19th century. Illustration: Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty
Diarmaid Ferriter
Sat, Mar 4, 2017, 06:00
First published:Sat, Mar 4, 2017, 06:00
-
Book Title:
Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
ISBN-13:
978-1849048088
Author:
Shashi Tharoor
Publisher:
Hurst
Guideline Price:
£20.00
Chronicling the evils of British imperialism is imperative given the impact and legacy of that imperialism, and given the dishonest and selective nostalgia about it, not to mention downright ignorance. Almost 60 per cent of Britons were proud of the British Empire and almost 50 per cent thought it had made the colonies better off – a manifestation of what the scholar Paul Gilroy has termed postcolonial melancholia – according to a YouGov poll in 2014.
Inglorious Empire, by Shashi Tharoor, a United Nations diplomat turned Indian National Congress MP in New Delhi, adds to a growing list of books on what the British did to India, most recently Jon Wilson’s India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire. Wilson underlines how the British view of themselves as conquerors generated a racist delusion of “victor’s sovereignty”, an argument still fuelled by the current wave of empire nostalgia.
Tharoor notes, somewhat quietly in a footnote towards the end, that Wilson’s effort was published “just as this book was going to press” and “makes much the same case” about the extent to which Britain benefited from imperial rule at the expense of the conquered.
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The growing library is justified; Britain’s exploitative, racist imperial project in India was awesome in its savagery and vindictiveness, what Tharoor calls a “long and shameless record of rapacity”. The recent books are a welcome antidote to the nauseating righteousness and condescension pedalled by Niall Ferguson in his 2003 book Empire, which argues that British imperialism gave to the world its admirable and distinctive features (language, banking, representative assemblies, the idea of liberty) and that India, “the world’s largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule”.
Tharoor sets out energetically, bluntly and hurriedly the litany of exploitation and theft, and the support given to the East India Company. This was before the Government of India Act of 1858 led the British crown to assume direct control. The company had a private army of 260,000 at the start of the 19th century, and the champions of the British industrial revolution plundered India’s thriving manufacturing industries.
Under British rule India’s share of world manufacturing exports fell from 27 per cent to 2 per cent as East India employees made colossal fortunes. The marquess of Salisbury, secretary of state for India in the 1870s, remarked that “India is to be bled”, and by the end of the 19th century it was Britain’s biggest source of revenue.
“To stop is dangerous; to recede ruin” was the logic, as enunciated early by Robert Clive, commander in chief of British India in the mid-18th century. The Indian shipping industry was destroyed and Indian currency manipulated while tariffs and regulations were skewed to favour British industry.
British boast
Tharoor also demolishes the British boast that it left India in 1947 a functioning democracy. And although he might exaggerate the extent to which precolonial village self-rule was ideal (“a society of little societies” in the soft phrase of Jon Wilson), he does expose the hollowness of Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation that “in their prosperity will be our strength, in their contentment our security and in their gratitude our best reward”.
This fostered a court culture for Indian princes to follow, and there were many dissolute rajas, but just 4 per cent of the coveted positions in the Indian civil service were filled by Indians as late as 1930. The nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru was cutting in his dismissal of a civil service that was “neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service”.
By 1890 about 6,000 British officials ruled 250 million Indians, but there was also a “cravenness, cupidity, opportunism and lack of organized resistance on the part of the vanquished”.
Ultimately, it was the rise of Mahatma Gandhi and his promotion of the moral values derived from satyagraha (nonviolent resistance) that “proved a repudiation of British liberalism and not its vindication”.
Racial theories
India’s native newspapers were also devoured. In 1875 an estimated 475 newspapers existed, most owned and edited by Indians, but severe restrictions were placed on their operations and editors. British racial theories were in full flow in relation to railway matters, with legislation making it impossible for Indian workshops to design and manufacture locomotives.
Racism was also reflected in the penal code: “there had never been a taboo against homosexuality in Indian culture and practice until the British Victorians introduced one.” Crucially, Britain also “helped solidify and perpetuate the iniquities of the caste system”, which was made out to be more uniform and pervasive than it had been. Religion became a useful means of divide and rule, with the fostering of a two-nation theory that eventually divided the country and made partition inevitable; one million were killed and 17 million displaced.
Tharoor’s assertion that “stories abound” of Hindu and Muslim communities “habitually working together in pre-colonial times” is a bit loose and ambiguous, but Lord Oliver, the secretary of state in the 1920s, admitted a predominant bias in British officialdom in favour of the Muslim community to offset Hindu nationalism. The British also sponsored a Shia-Sunni divide in Lucknow and generally transformed religious differences into public, political and legal issues.
There are also reminders of the vile racism of Winston Churchill: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion . . . Let the Viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant and trample Gandhi into the dirt.” Tharoor seeks to demolish the myth of “enlightened despotism” given brutalities like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, with soldiers “emptying their magazines into the shrieking, wailing, then stampeding crowd with trained precision”. It is a pity he does not give the context for the comment of William Joynson-Hicks, home secretary in the 1928 Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin, that “we conquered India by the sword and by the sword we shall hold it. I am not such a hypocrite to say we hold India for the Indians.”
Up to 35 million died unnecessarily in famines; London ate India’s bread while India starved, and in 1943 nearly four million Bengalis died. It was their own fault, according to the odious Churchill, for “breeding like rabbits”. Collectively, these famines amounted to a “British colonial holocaust”.
Tharoor finds the argument that modernisation could not have taken place in India without British imperialism to be “particularly galling”. In response to the claim that empire laid the foundations for eventual success in a future globalised world, he quite rightly observes that “human beings do not live in the long run; they live, and suffer, in the here and now”. And although the “gift” of the English language cannot be denied (“I am after all using it as I write”), there was only a 16 per cent literacy rate at the time of Indian independence.
Inglorious Empire is not, however, a polished effort; it seems rushed. Tharoor admits the decision to write it, following online reaction to a provocative lecture he gave at Oxford, was “made rashly”, and it shows. It is too derivative and at times sloppy and sketchy, and the over-reliance on anecdote does not generate confidence. (“The story is told – I cannot pinpoint the source”; “There is a story – perhaps apocryphal”). He generalises when there is no need to, and the book becomes too repetitive (“Let’s look at the numbers one last time”).
There are also too many sweeping assertions: “By the early 1800s India had been reduced from a land of artisans, traders, warriors and merchants functioning in thriving and complex commercial networks into an agrarian society of peasants and moneylenders.”
Unromanticised history
Still, the book is a timely reminder of the need “to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools”, as “the British public is woefully ignorant of the realties of the British empire”. The book is helpful as a deconstruction of Niall Ferguson’s argument, because the evidence Tharoor piles high – mostly by synthesising the work of others – is overwhelming.
Indeed, it is so staggering that it becomes quite exhausting, but that should not merit too much sympathy for the well-connected, -heeled and -staffed Tharoor. He thanks his “two tireless researchers . . . who bore the brunt of the load” and a staff that “backed me up in a hundred vital ways throughout the writing of this book”.
Tharoor also had the generous hospitality and support of “His Majesty Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, King of Bhutan”, without whom “I would have been unable to write this book or finish it within deadline”.
Isn’t it well for him?
Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/inglorious-empire-what-the-british-did-to-india-1.2981299
'But what about the railways ...?' The myth of Britain's gifts to India
Colonialism
Apologists for empire like to claim that the British brought democracy, the rule of law and trains to India. Isn’t it a bit rich to oppress, torture and imprison a people for 200 years, then take credit for benefits that were entirely accidental?
Shashi Tharoor
Wed 8 Mar 2017 14.25 GMTLast modified on Sat 25 Nov 2017 03.27 GMT
Holding court ... the lieutenant-general of the Punjab takes tea with maharajas and Rajas in 1875. Photograph: Popperfoto
Many modern apologists for British colonial rule in
India no longer contest the basic facts of imperial exploitation and plunder, rapacity and loot, which are too deeply documented to be challengeable. Instead they offer a counter-argument: granted, the British took what they could for 200 years, but didn’t they also leave behind a great deal of lasting benefit? In particular, political unity and democracy, the rule of law, railways, English education, even tea and cricket?
Indeed, the British like to point out that the very idea of “India” as one entity (now three, but one during the British Raj), instead of multiple warring principalities and statelets, is the incontestable contribution of British imperial rule.
Unfortunately for this argument, throughout the history of the subcontinent, there has existed an impulsion for unity. The idea of India is as old as the Vedas, the earliest Hindu scriptures, which describe “Bharatvarsha” as the land between the Himalayas and the seas. If this “sacred geography” is essentially a Hindu idea,
Maulana Azad has written of how Indian Muslims, whether Pathans from the north-west or Tamils from the south, were all seen by Arabs as “Hindis”, hailing from a recognisable civilisational space. Numerous Indian rulers had sought to unite the territory, with the
Mauryas (three centuries before Christ) and the
Mughals coming the closest by ruling almost 90% of the subcontinent. Had the British not completed the job, there is little doubt that some Indian ruler, emulating his forerunners, would have done so.
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Divide and rule ... an English dignitary rides in an Indian procession, c1754. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Getty Images
Far from crediting Britain for India’s unity and enduring parliamentary democracy, the facts point clearly to policies that undermined it – the dismantling of existing political institutions, the fomenting of communal division and systematic political discrimination with a view to maintaining British domination.
In the years after 1757, the British astutely fomented cleavages among the Indian princes, and steadily consolidated their dominion through a policy of divide and rule. Later, in 1857, the sight of
Hindu and Muslim soldiers rebelling together, willing to pledge joint allegiance to the enfeebled Mughal monarch, alarmed the British, who concluded that pitting the two groups against one another was the most effective way to ensure the unchallenged continuance of empire. As early as 1859, the then British governor of Bombay, Lord Elphinstone, advised London that “Divide et impera was the old Roman maxim, and it should be ours”.
Since the British came from a hierarchical society with an entrenched class system, they instinctively looked for a similar one in India. The effort to understand ethnic, religious, sectarian and caste differences among Britain’s subjects inevitably became an exercise in defining, dividing and perpetuating these differences. Thus colonial administrators regularly wrote reports and conducted censuses that classified Indians in ever-more bewilderingly narrow terms, based on their language, religion, sect, caste, sub-caste, ethnicity and skin colour. Not only were ideas of community reified, but also entire new communities were created by people who had not consciously thought of themselves as particularly different from others around them.
Large-scale conflicts between Hindus and Muslims (religiously defined), only began under colonial rule; many other kinds of social strife were labelled as religious due to the colonists’ orientalist assumption that religion was the fundamental division in Indian society.
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Muslim refugees cram aboard a train during the partition conflict in 1947 ... the railways were first conceived by the East India Company for its own benefit. Photograph: AP
It is questionable whether a totalising Hindu or Muslim identity existed in any meaningful sense in India before the 19th century. Yet the creation and perpetuation of Hindu–Muslim antagonism was the most significant accomplishment of British imperial policy: the project of divide et impera would reach its culmination in the collapse of British authority in 1947. Partition left behind a million dead, 13 million displaced, billions of rupees of property destroyed, and the flames of communal hatred blazing hotly across the ravaged land. No greater indictment of the failures of British rule in India can be found than the tragic manner of its ending.
Nor did Britain work to promote democratic institutions under imperial rule, as it liked to pretend. Instead of building self-government from the village level up, the East India Company destroyed what existed. The British ran government, tax collection, and administered what passed for justice. Indians were excluded from all of these functions. When the crown eventually took charge of the country, it devolved smidgens of government authority, from the top, to unelected provincial and central “legislative” councils whose members represented a tiny educated elite, had no accountability to the masses, passed no meaningful legislation, exercised no real power and satisfied themselves they had been consulted by the government even if they took no actual decisions.
As late as 1920, under the
Montagu-Chelmsford “reforms”, Indian representatives on the councils – elected by a franchise so restricted and selective that only one in 250 Indians had the right to vote – would exercise control over subjects the British did not care about, like education and health, while real power, including taxation, law and order and the authority to nullify any vote by the Indian legislators, would rest with the British governor of the provinces.
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Shashi Tharoor: Britain should pay India damages over colonial rule
Democracy, in other words, had to be prised from the reluctant grasp of the British by Indian nationalists. It is a bit rich to oppress, torture, imprison, enslave, deport and proscribe a people for 200 years, and then take credit for the fact that they are democratic at the end of it.
A corollary of the argument that Britain gave India political unity and democracy is that it established the rule of law in the country. This was, in many ways, central to the British self-conception of imperial purpose; Kipling, that flatulent voice of Victorian imperialism, would wax eloquent on the noble duty to bring law to those without it. But British law had to be imposed upon an older and more complex civilisation with its own legal culture, and the British used coercion and cruelty to get their way. And in the colonial era, the rule of law was not exactly impartial.
Crimes committed by whites against Indians attracted minimal punishment; an Englishmen who shot dead his Indian servant got six months’ jail time and a modest fine (then about 100 rupees), while an Indian convicted of attempted rape against an Englishwoman was sentenced to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment. In the entire two centuries of British rule, only three cases can be found of Englishmen executed for murdering Indians, while the murders of thousands more at British hands went unpunished.
The death of an Indian at British hands was always an accident, and that of a Briton because of an Indian’s actions always a capital crime. When a British master kicked an Indian servant in the stomach – a not uncommon form of conduct in those days – the Indian’s resultant death from a ruptured spleen would be blamed on his having an enlarged spleen as a result of malaria. Punch wrote an entire ode to The Stout British Boot as the favoured instrument of keeping the natives in order.
Political dissidence was legally repressed through various acts, including a sedition law far more rigorous than its British equivalent. The penal code contained 49 articles on crimes relating to dissent against the state (and only 11 on crimes involving death).
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Rudyard Kipling, ‘that flatulent voice of Victorian imperialism would wax eloquent on the noble duty to bring law to those without it’. Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images
Of course the British did give India the English language, the benefits of which persist to this day. Or did they? The English language was not a deliberate gift to India, but again an instrument of colonialism, imparted to Indians only to facilitate the tasks of the English. In his notorious 1835
Minute on Education, Lord Macaulay articulated the classic reason for teaching English, but only to a small minority of Indians: “We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”
The language was taught to a few to serve as intermediaries between the rulers and the ruled. The British had no desire to educate the Indian masses, nor were they willing to budget for such an expense. That Indians seized the English language and turned it into an instrument for our own liberation – using it to express nationalist sentiments against the British – was to their credit, not by British design.
The construction of the Indian Railways is often pointed to by apologists for empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonised to do so. But the facts are even more damning.
The railways were first conceived of by the East India Company, like everything else in that firm’s calculations, for its own benefit. Governor General Lord Hardinge argued in 1843 that the railways would be beneficial “to the commerce, government and military control of the country”. In their very conception and construction, the Indian railways were a colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns double those of government stocks, paid entirely from Indian, and not British, taxes. It was a splendid racket for Britons, at the expense of the Indian taxpayer.
The railways were intended principally to transport extracted resources – coal, iron ore, cotton and so on – to ports for the British to ship home to use in their factories. The movement of people was incidental, except when it served colonial interests; and the third-class compartments, with their wooden benches and total absence of amenities, into which Indians were herded, attracted horrified comment even at the time.
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Asserting British rule during the war of independence, also known as the Indian mutiny, 1857. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Getty Images
And, of course, racism reigned; though whites-only compartments were soon done away with on grounds of economic viability, Indians found the available affordable space grossly inadequate for their numbers. (A marvellous post-independence cartoon captured the situation perfectly: it showed an overcrowded train, with people hanging off it, clinging to the windows, squatting perilously on the roof, and spilling out of their third-class compartments, while two Britons in sola topis sit in an empty first-class compartment saying to each other, “My dear chap, there’s
nobody on this train!”)
Nor were Indians employed in the railways. The prevailing view was that the railways would have to be staffed almost exclusively by Europeans to “protect investments”. This was especially true of signalmen, and those who operated and repaired the steam trains, but the policy was extended to the absurd level that even in the early 20th century all the key employees, from directors of the Railway Board to ticket-collectors, were white men – whose salaries and benefits were also paid at European, not Indian, levels and largely repatriated back to England.
Racism combined with British economic interests to undermine efficiency. The railway workshops in Jamalpur in Bengal and Ajmer in Rajputana were established in 1862 to maintain the trains, but their Indian mechanics became so adept that in 1878 they started designing and building their own locomotives. Their success increasingly alarmed the British, since the Indian locomotives were just as good, and a great deal cheaper, than the British-made ones. In 1912, therefore, the British passed an act of parliament explicitly making it impossible for Indian workshops to design and manufacture locomotives. Between 1854 and 1947, India imported around 14,400 locomotives from England, and another 3,000 from Canada, the US and Germany, but made none in India after 1912. After independence, 35 years later, the old technical knowledge was so completely lost to India that the Indian Railways had to go cap-in-hand to the British to guide them on setting up a locomotive factory in India again. There was, however, a fitting postscript to this saga. The principal technology consultants for Britain’s railways, the London-based Rendel, today rely extensively on Indian technical expertise, provided to them by Rites, a subsidiary of the Indian Railways.
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Mother and children ... the British left a society with 16% literacy, a life expectancy of 27 and over 90% living below the poverty line. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
The process of colonial rule in India meant economic exploitation and ruin to millions, the destruction of thriving industries, the systematic denial of opportunities to compete, the elimination of indigenous institutions of governance, the transformation of lifestyles and patterns of living that had flourished since time immemorial, and the obliteration of the most precious possessions of the colonised, their identities and their self-respect. In 1600, when the East India Company was established, Britain was producing just 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was generating some 23% (27% by 1700). By 1940, after nearly two centuries of the Raj, Britain accounted for nearly 10% of world GDP, while India had been reduced to a poor “third-world” country, destitute and starving, a global poster child of poverty and famine. The British left a society with 16% literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic industry and over 90% living below what today we would call the poverty line.
The India the British entered was a wealthy, thriving and commercialising society: that was why the East India Company was interested in it in the first place. Far from being backward or underdeveloped, pre-colonial India exported high quality manufactured goods much sought after by Britain’s fashionable society. The British elite wore Indian linen and silks, decorated their homes with Indian chintz and decorative textiles, and craved Indian spices and seasonings. In the 17th and 18th centuries, British shopkeepers tried to pass off shoddy English-made textiles as Indian in order to charge higher prices for them.
The story of India, at different phases of its several-thousand-year-old civilisational history, is replete with great educational institutions, magnificent cities ahead of any conurbations of their time anywhere in the world, pioneering inventions, world-class manufacturing and industry, and abundant prosperity – in short, all the markers of successful modernity today – and there is no earthly reason why this could not again have been the case, if its resources had not been drained away by the British.
If there were positive byproducts for Indians from the institutions the British established and ran in India in their own interests, they were never intended to benefit Indians. Today Indians cannot live without the railways; the Indian authorities have reversed British policies and they are used principally to transport people, with freight bearing ever higher charges in order to subsidise the passengers (exactly the opposite of British practice).
This is why Britain’s historical amnesia about the rapacity of its rule in India is so deplorable. Recent years have seen the rise of what the scholar Paul Gilroy called “postcolonial melancholia”, the yearning for the glories of Empire, with a
2014 YouGov poll finding 59% of respondents thought the British empire was “something to be proud of”, and only 19% were “ashamed” of its misdeeds.
All this is not intended to have any bearing on today’s Indo-British relationship. That is now between two sovereign and equal nations, not between an imperial overlord and oppressed subjects; indeed, British prime minister Theresa May recently visited India to seek investment in her post-Brexit economy. As I’ve often argued, you don’t need to seek revenge upon history. History is its own revenge.
• Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor is published by Hurst & Company at £20. Go to
bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/08/india-britain-empire-railways-myths-gifts
