English merchants set up the East India Company in 1600. Over the next 150 years it established a monopoly on trade and became so powerful that it eventually developed into a company-government which ruled over much of India.

British history books still call the 1857 revolt by Indian soldiers the Indian Mutiny. Most Indians, however, see it as the first action in a long war of independence. The British put down the revolt and transferred all governing powers directly to the British Crown. This did not stop the independence movement. In 1885, the Indian National Congress was formed. It soon divided between moderates and those who wanted full independence. Little was achieved until a young lawyer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, returned to his native India from South Africa in 1915.

He united the Congress and began to involve ordinary people in the freedom movement. He fought the British in a new way, called ahimsa, which means non-violent, non-cooperation. He campaigned for the untouchables who are the people at the bottom of the caste system, and encouraged craft industries to replace manufactured, British goods. Mahatma (Great Soul) Gandhi was imprisoned during World War II, but as soon as there was peace, negotiations for independence began. The British finally left India in 1947.

“In the English-speaking World”