Britain has spent decades asking the world to admire its empire while refusing to acknowledge its damage. That is the oldest trick in imperial politics: take the wealth, and rewrite the theft as a gift. Suella Braverman’s latest intervention belongs squarely in that tradition. In her version of events, the ex-colonies owe Britain for the empire’s supposed “investment” and “development”.
The problem is not just that this is offensive. It is that it depends on selective memory. When a British-Indian politician suggests that former colonies should pay Britain back, she asks us to forget the scale of what the empire did to India. Before British rule hardened into domination, India accounted for roughly 23 percent of the world economy. By 1947, that share had fallen to around 4 percent. That collapse was the outcome of a system built on extraction, loot and plunder.
The East India Company was the first instrument of this colonial system. It arrived as a trading corporation but rapidly transformed into an engine of extraction. Its model was simple: seize revenue, compel the cultivation of cash crops, dismantle indigenous industries, and redirect India’s agricultural and commercial surplus towards British economic and imperial interests. The consequences were devastating.
India did not merely sustain the British empire at enormous cost, we also bore the brunt of Britain’s wars. During the First World War, around 75,000 Indian soldiers laid down their lives, while tens of thousands more were wounded or captured. India supplied Britain with materials and contributed £146 million, roughly 9 percent of India’s GDP.
During the Second World War, the Indian army was the largest all-volunteer force that rose from 200,000 men in 1939 to over 2.5 million men by 1945. More than 87,000 were killed and around 65,000 wounded. India became Britain’s wartime arsenal. It also spent approximately £350 million on defence and extended war credits worth £1.321 billion to Britain—equivalent to nearly 30 percent of India’s GDP.
Yet, Britain repaid India with one of the darkest chapters in its history: the Bengal Famine, in which millions died while food continued to be diverted to imperial priorities; the chaotic and hasty Partition that displaced millions and left over a million dead; and the legacy of communal division and conflict.
Britain did not leave India prosperous or prepared. It left a country exhausted by exploitation, fractured by imperial policy and burdened with rebuilding after nearly two centuries of plunder. Yes, the British built railways, ports and administrative institutions—but not as gifts. They were instruments of the empire, designed to extract raw materials, move troops, tighten control and funnel wealth to Britain.
That is the first great inversion in Braverman’s argument. She invites us to celebrate the infrastructure while forgetting the exploitation that made it possible—to remember the railways but not the revenue, the ports but not the peasants, the bureaucracy but not the artisans whose livelihoods were destroyed. The visible monuments of the empire are presented as evidence of benevolence, while the invisible machinery of dispossession, coercion and extraction that financed them is conveniently erased.
The contrast with the Mughals is important, though it should not be romanticised. The Mughal State accumulated wealth largely within India because India was its political and economic centre. The British empire systematically transferred Indian wealth overseas because India was a colony. One empire sought legitimacy by embedding itself in the subcontinent; the other by governing it from a distance for metropolitan gain.
That is why the claim that Britain “developed” its colonies is such a grotesque inversion of history. Colonial “investment” was built on coerced extraction, not consent-based development. As such, the argument that former colonies should somehow repay Britain for these “investments” turns history on its head. If anything, it is Britain that owes a historical debt for the systematic exploitation of India’s people, resources and wealth over nearly two centuries.
Jamaica and the Caribbean Community (Caricom) have transformed the case for reparations from a moral appeal into a coherent political programme. Their demands go far beyond symbolism, encompassing a formal apology, reparatory development financing, debt relief, investment in health and education, and the restitution of cultural heritage.
India belongs within that broader conversation, albeit on its own terms. Unlike Caricom, New Delhi has not pursued a formal reparations claim, preferring historical critique over diplomatic confrontation. That restraint, however, should not be mistaken for the absence of a claim. India was the economic heart of the British empire. If the logic of reparations applies anywhere, it applies with equal, if not greater, force to India.
But India’s claim cannot be confined to monetary compensation alone. It should encompass a broader framework of historical justice: the restitution of looted artefacts, full archival transparency, a formal apology for exploitation, and a fundamental reassessment of how the British empire is taught and remembered in Britain.
The timing matters too. With Labour in government, Britain has a rare opportunity to confront its imperial past at the highest political level. Can Britain finally acknowledge that the empire was not merely a story of railways, institutions and trade, but also one of conquest, extraction and domination, obscured by imperial mythmaking?
Braverman’s claim is useful only because it strips away the mask. It lays bare a strain of British imperial nostalgia that seeks to recast domination as development. That historical whitewashing must now be confronted—directly, honestly and without apology.
(Views are personal)
Pawan Khera
Member of Parliament and head of media
and publicity department, AICC
