the conveniences of modern systems such as a postal system, an educational system, and other such innovations, colonialism was a boon to the Indian people. Even to the extent that many Indians ended up receiving an academic education, if for the most part indirect, at the hands of the British, colonialism can be lauded for the fact that the Indian people were in some ways better off under colonial rule.
However, there were other features of colonialism that were not so beneficial and features of pre-colonial India that the British did nothing about. One would think that they would have destroyed the inherently inequitable caste system, but they did nothing to interfere with that. In point of fact, upon further analysis, it seems that the British mainly did what furthered their own economy. As Bose and Jalal point out, Britain was "uncomfortable with, and threatened by, the mobility of eighteenth-century rural society," and "Pax Britannica and the British Revenue collecting machine sought to sedentarize and peasantize Indian society" (60), hardly a rousing endorsement of British colonial rule. Bose and Jalal state that "Reordering of the political economy of colonial India was as important as restructuring the institutions of the state" (80). The authors explain that the Indian market had been slowly opening up to the British since the early nineteenth century, and that in the 1850s India began exporting its raw materials such as "cotton, jute, tea, coffee, wheat and oil seeds" (Bose & Jalal 80). Not surprisingly, "the colonial system required the annual transfer of funds from the colony to the metropolis to meet an array of home charges. These were funnelled through India's rising export surplus" and include
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