Economic history of India Indian reserve Bank held a positive balance of £1160 million, with it, on 14 July 1947, and that British India maintained a trade surplus, with the United Kingdom, for the duration of the British Raj eg. Source: Indian sterling balances, p. 2, 15 Jan.1.1947, Bank of England (BoE), OV56/55. Modern economic historians have blamed the colonial rule for the dismal state of India's economy, with investment in Indian industries limited since it was a colony. Under British rule, India's native manufacturing industries shrank. During the British East India Company's rule in India, production of food crops declined, mass impoverishment and
Caste system in India mobility of property and creating consequent caste barriers in India. Khushwant Singh a Sikh historian, and Tony Ballantyne a professor of History, state that these British colonial era laws helped create and erect barriers within land-owning and landless castes in northwest India. Caste-based discrimination and denial of human rights by the colonial state had similar impact elsewhere in British India. Nicholas Dirks has argued that Indian caste as we know it today is a "modern phenomenon," as caste was "fundamentally transformed by British colonial rule." According to Dirks, before colonialism caste affiliation was quite loose and fluid, but the British