It takes more than the civil service to run a colony.
It is quite curious both you and the other replier jumped to that conclusion, and says quite a lot about the current British malaise.
It is quite curious both you and the other replier jumped to that conclusion, and says quite a lot about the current British malaise.
Even if you round up to 1,000 the number of ICS officers and dectuple to 10,000 you get a trivial number of returnees to the UK. The British Army in India returning would have had nugatory impact considering the British had just fought WW2.
Leaving India was bad for the British upper classes because there were fewer jobs as officers that would keep a man in the store to which he had become accustomed on salary in the army. The ICS was less important than that in terms of numbers and its peak social impact was as an inspiration for the British civil service. The ICS is the only organisation in British India that might plausibly have had a large impact on the culture of the British civil service and it was too small to have had an impact by numbers alone as you originally posited.
Why are we obsessed with restricting discussion to ICS? The bureaucracy is not just that, but extends throughout the entire service sector these people rely on, such as banking, schooling, transportation, manufacturing management and so on.
There is real denial going on here as to the extent of what happened.
There is no plausible mechanism by which these people could have effected a radical change in the general British culture or the culture of the British civil service. The culture of the British in India was an expatriate one, not one of colonial settlement or intermarriage (certainly not after 1900).
They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect even though in class composition the civilian element was elevated in education and social class compared to the general population.
The pied noirs in Algeria were settlers and they were distinctly different in terms of ethnic composition, being disproportionately Spanish, Maltese and Italian in ancestry compared to French from l’Hexagone and it’s still a matter of debate if their descendants are noticeably different from other French. The British in India were just that. Not a lot more culturally influential in the home country than the British in the UAE. As of 2015 there were A quarter of the million Britons in the UAE. That’s more than twice as many people from Britain in a petrostate then were ever in India.
These people were somehow capable of running India and yet at the same time could not cause a change in the UK if they returned en masse?
> They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect
You have a very odd view of life in the UK if you believe this.
>You have a very odd view of life in the UK if you believe this.
If all 250,000 Britons in the UAE returned to the UK in the next three months I would expect it to have no noticeable effect a year from now. By the same token I wouldn’t expect much from 100,000 Brits moving from India to the UK in 1947. West Indian migration starting in the 1960s or Ugandan Indians in the 1970s are movements of people who are genuinely different in important ways.
Those had no great effect on the civil service culture either.
Those 250k Britons in the UAE are not state supported colonists, and so do not have the attitudes and culture of state supported colonists.
Edit: specifically the colonial attitude that the inhabitants of a colony exist as a natural resource to be exploited purely for the benefit of the colonists. This is now the attitude that exists throughout the UK state towards the inhabitants of the UK.