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The First Ever Brexit: When Britain (Finally) Left India
India’s Journey from Plundered Past to the Next Superpower
August 15, 1947, Britain executed its first grand exit of the modern era, and it wasn’t from Brussels. It was from Delhi. After two centuries of “civilising” us at our expense, they packed up their ledgers, stolen goods — err, “gifts” in their colonial coffers, and with stiff upper lips, sailed away.
We called it Independence. They referred to it as the “transfer of power.” History might more honestly call it what it was, the most reluctant eviction in geopolitical memory.
The India Which Was
Long before the Union Jack fluttered over the Red Fort, India was a vast economic and cultural crossroads. We traded in spices, textiles, philosophy, and the occasional mathematician who shattered Europe’s comfortable monopoly on ignorance!
The British East India Company arrived in 1600, armed with contracts, cannons, and a peculiar fondness for claiming countries they could barely locate on a map. Over the next two centuries, they perfected the art of governance by the extraction of resources, wealth, and occasionally dignity.
Fast forward to the 1940s, and the empire was exhausted by colonizing most of the continents, so…
