<P> The subject of the economic impact of British imperialism on India remains contentious . The issue was raised by British Whig politician Edmund Burke who in 1778 began a seven - year impeachment trial against Warren Hastings and the East India Company on charges including mismanagement of the Indian economy . Contemporary historian Rajat Kanta Ray argues the economy established by the British in the 18th century was a form of plunder and a catastrophe for the traditional economy of Mughal India, depleting food and money stocks and imposing high taxes that helped cause the famine of 1770, which killed a third of the people of Bengal . In contrast, historian Niall Ferguson argues that under British rule, the village economy's total after - tax income rose from 27% to 54% (the sector represented three quarters of the entire population) and that the British had invested £ 270 million in Indian infrastructure, irrigation and industry by the 1880s (representing one - fifth of entire British investment overseas) and by 1914 that figure had reached £ 400 million . He also argues that the British increased the area of irrigated land by a factor of eight, contrasting with 5% under the Mughals . </P> <P> P.J. Marshall argues the British regime did not make any sharp break with the traditional economy and control was largely left in the hands of regional rulers . The economy was sustained by general conditions of prosperity through the latter part of the 18th century, except the frequent famines with high fatality rates . Marshall notes the British raised revenue through local tax administrators and kept the old Mughal rates of taxation . Marshall also contends the British managed this primarily indigenous - controlled economy through cooperation with Indian elites . </P> <P> Historians have questioned why India did not undergo industrialisation in the nineteenth century in the way that Britain did . In the seventeenth century, India was a relatively urbanised and commercialised nation with a buoyant export trade, devoted largely to cotton textiles, but also including silk, spices, and rice . India was the world's main producer of cotton textiles and had a substantial export trade to Britain, as well as many other European countries, via the East India Company . Yet as the British cotton industry underwent a technological revolution during the late 18th to early 19th centuries, the Indian industry stagnated and deindustrialized . India also underwent a period of deindustrialization in the latter half of the 18th century as an indirect outcome of the collapse of the Mughal Empire . </P> <P> Even as late as 1772, Henry Patullo, in the course of his comments on the economic resources of Bengal, could claim confidently that the demand for Indian textiles could never reduce, since no other nation could equal or rival it in quality . However, by the early nineteenth century, the beginning of a long history of decline of textile exports is observed . </P>

Who gave the economic critiques of british imperialism