This brief summary of a long and complex chapter of events suffices to show that the beginning of British rule in India was not prompted by what has come to be called "imperialism." It did not originate in British aggression. It was the outcome of anarchy in India aggravated by war in Europe--a war which Britain fought to save herself and thereby the rest of Europe from the domination of Napoleon. ... It should be remembered that the Indians who fought as British troops or allies were not only helping to create a British Raj but were helping to prevent...a French Raj. ...

...The American Revolution had convinced them that an imperialism based on "colonies" and "possessions" was mistaken...

. . .If the bureaucracy of the British Raj was a kind of despotism, it was a very different kind from that which the Indian people had experienced before the British came.  In the first place, the British Raj was stronger than any of its predecessors, stronger even than the Mogul [Mughal] Empire, and this enabled it to keep India, as never before, safe from attack without and united and at peace within. The old menace of invasion was dispelled [eliminated]. ...The countryside was no longer swept from time to time by warring and rapacious [aggressive] hosts. The main highways were no longer infested by bands of brigands [bandits]. Villagers could sleep of nights: their lives and property were safer now than they had ever been.

Secondly, the British Raj replaced arbitrary despotism by the rule of law. By becoming British subjects many millions of Indians acquired "a government of laws, not of men," and therewith as full a protection of their personal rights by impersonal justice and as wide a measure of civil liberty as any people in the world enjoyed. As to the content of the law, the existing laws were consolidated and codified in accordance with "the indisputable principle," as a British parliamentary committee put it, "that the interests of the Native subjects are to be consulted in preference to those of Europeans whenever the two come into competition, and that therefore the laws ought to be adapted rather to the feelings and habits of the Natives than to those of Europeans." The adoption of English judicial procedure, it is sometimes argued, was unwise, since it was ill suited to the backward conditions of Indian country life.

But otherwise the creation of the new courts of justice was an almost unqualified gain. They obtained, wrote an experienced Indian nationalist ",a prestige and authority unknown in Asia" outside the areas of European rule. They planted in the Indian mind a new respect for law as something to which even the strongest Government must bow. The value of this gift has yet to be put to its final proof; for it is on allegiance to a sovereign law that the peace and stability of the free India of the future must mainly depend. . . .

The first immediate economic need...was a better system of communications. Already before the [Sepoy] Mutiny new trunk roads and innumerable lesser roads and bridges had been built, steamship services provided on the greater rivers, ports enlarged and improved, and the construction of railways begun; and with the railways came the telegraph and a cheap and uniform postal service. 

The second immediate need was irrigation--to combat drought and to improve the yield and extend the area of cultivation--and even more impressive than the spread of the network of rails and wires over India was the cutting of canals through its thirsty and sun-baked soil. By 1900 India possessed far greatest system of irrigation in the world. ... Large areas, especially in the north-west, which had been nothing but arid wilderness, were transformed into fertile crop-land, and on much of it hundreds of thousands of peasants from overcrowded districts found new homes and means of livelihood. ... Railways and canals facilitated the task of grappling with famine. ...

Meantime the country as a whole was undergoing an economic revolution. ... Innumerable local barriers to trade were swept away, and British India...became one great area of free trade. In the second place the introduction of Western business methods, the creation of a modern banking system, the development of commercial law, together with the building of railways and the expansion of sea transport, brought all India for the first time into the complex of world economics. ... After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869...Indian wheat could be sold in the world-market at a world-price. ... Plantations, once limited to indigo, were extended to coffee and tea.