Britain in India, Ideology and Economics to 1900

By 1858 all but around 40 percent of India – what today is Pakistan, India and Bangladesh – was under British control, and all but from 20 to 25 percent of India's population. Between 1861 and 1891 the British became more enthusiastic about empire, and they annexed an additional 109,000 square miles of India's territory. Between 1891 and 1901 they annexed 133,000 more square miles. This rule was above many divisions, between many princes and between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. But British were pulling many of them together in a nationalism hostile to their rule, some of them attending universities where they learned the liberalism and freedom valued by the English. 

The popular British poet Rudyard Kipling was much focused on India (where he was born), and in 1899 he wrote "Take up the White Man's Burden," which begins with an opinion about the colonized that would not hold up with the fall of empire and going into the 21st century:

Rudyard Kipling

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Britain's Conservative Party had increasingly embraced the ideology of imperialism, as did the Liberals, both satisfied that empire was good for commerce and that empire was producing profits rather than being a burden on the treasury. There was talk about Britain's "share in the partition of the world" and the "future of the race." The belief was widespread among the British that they were a race apart and chosen to distribute a superior civilization to other peoples.

Britain had been the leading liberal power in the world, and it was now relatively conservative concerning domestic politics. Its political leaders were reluctant to do what Bismarck had been doing in Germany: regulate the hours of work, regulate working conditions and offer the social insurance. Woman's suffrage was largely a middle-class movement among a minority of intellectual women, and it was rejected. Women were not allowed to attend universities – Cambridge in particular. In Britain, social hierarchy was widely accepted across class lines.

Meanwhile, much of Britain’s investment abroad went to Latin America and North America. Manufacturing was declining in Britain relative to Germany and the United States as, according to some, British banks were focusing too much on investing abroad.