India was the jewel of the British Empire, and no colonial area experienced a more profound British impact. Arriving in India on the heels of the Portuguese in the seventeenth century, the British East India Company had conquered the last independent native state by 1848. The last “traditional” response to European rule — an attempt by the indigenous ruling classes to drive the invaders out by military force — was broken in India in 1857 and 1858. Those were the years of the Great Rebellion, an insurrection by Muslim and Hindu mercenaries in the British army that spread throughout northern and central India before it was finally crushed. Britain then ruled India directly until Indian independence was gained in 1947.

India was ruled by the British Parliament in London and administered by a tiny, all-white civil service in India. The white elite, backed by white officers and native troops, was competent and generally well disposed toward the welfare of the Indian peasant masses. Yet it practiced strict job discrimination and social segregation, and most of its members quite frankly considered Indian peoples to be racially inferior.

British women played an important part in the imperial enterprise, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made it much easier for civil servants and businessmen to bring their wives and children with them to India. These British families tended to live in their own separate communities, where they occupied large houses staffed with a multitude of servants. It was the wife’s responsibility to manage this complex household.

A small minority of British women — many of them feminists, social reformers, or missionaries, both married and single — sought to go further and shoulder what one historian has called the “white women’s burden” in India.4 These women tried especially to improve the lives of Indian women, both Hindu and Muslim, promoting education and legislation to move them closer to the better conditions they believed Western women had attained. Their greatest success was educating some elite Hindu women who took up the cause of reform.

With British men and women sharing a sense of mission as well as strong feelings of racial and cultural superiority, the British acted energetically and introduced many desirable changes to India. Realizing that they needed well-educated Indians to serve as skilled subordinates in both the government and the army, the British established a modern system of secondary education, with all instruction in English. Thus some Indians gained excellent opportunities for economic and social advancement. High-caste Hindus, particularly quick to respond, emerged as skillful intermediaries between the British rulers and the Indian people, and soon they formed a new elite profoundly influenced by Western thought and culture. This new native elite joined British officials and businessmen to promote modern economic development, a second result of British rule. Unfortunately, the lot of the Indian masses improved little, for the profits from the increase in production went to native and British elites.

Finally, with a well-educated, English-speaking Indian bureaucracy and steps toward economic development, the British created a unified, powerful state. They placed under the same system of law and administration the different Hindu and Muslim peoples and the vanquished kingdoms of the entire subcontinent — groups that had fought each other for centuries and had been repeatedly conquered by Muslim and Mongol invaders.

Despite these achievements, the decisive reaction to European rule was the rise of nationalism among the Indian elite. No matter how anglicized and necessary a member of the educated classes became, he or she could never become the white ruler’s social equal. For Indian nationalists, racial discrimination flagrantly contradicted the cherished Western concepts of human rights and equality that they had learned about in Western schools. Moreover, it was based on dictatorship, no matter how benign.

By 1885, when educated Indians came together to found the predominantly Hindu Indian National Congress, demands were increasing for the equality and self-government that Britain had already granted white-settler colonies, such as Canada and Australia. By 1907, emboldened in part by Japan’s success (see the next section), a radical faction in the Indian National Congress called for Indian independence.