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I don't believe this at all. We were never colonized in Sweden and the exact same thing happened.
Also the British in India (notably unlike Ireland) governed through local elites - they had to given that the Indian Civil Service only employed less than 8000 expats - so the idea that local elites lost their initiative due to the effects of British rule seems implausible.
Yeah. I've always found the movie Lagaan insane where they're holding up the existing monarchial despot as being oppressed by having a layer of British taxation on top of his feudalism. Like I understand in the movie the British are enforcing a brutal tax, but it's not like India having droughts and feudal taxation being harsh are some unique invention of the Anglo.
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Local elites were kept on a short leash; if you got any uppity notions about "hey this is our country and I should be governing on my own behalf, not as the puppet satrap of an overseas empire", you got swatted and the British government stepped in to take over and run the entire enterprise directly, instead of letting a trading company do it.
Yes but in a lot of the satraps the previous running of affairs prior to the British was also some flavor of being a Satrap to the Mughals, Maratha or whoever the hell else. And if you were a peasant it didn't make a huge lick of difference who exactly held the reins of power on account of said reins being about 14 social classes above where you were.
I've got a few friends of very upper-caste Indian extraction, and the complaints about the Raj always rang somewhat hollow to me as the vibe was always very 'For a century there we were only the 2nd highest rung of the ladder, and lived lives of luxury that were somewhat obliged to Anglos' ilk whilst trying to uplift the grievances of commoners as being somehow related to their great grandfather who was the vice-chief minister of Commerce for Bombay and dined mightily off his servants.
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That's true of all management all the time. If a mid-level line manager gets uppity motions about 'this is my factory and I should be governing on my own behalf, not as a puppet of the CEO', he or she is going to get smacked down. Despite this, different companies/orgs allow very different levels of initiative at lower levels.
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