Indians and Colonisation

While Indians are so opposed to the liberation of Iraq by the Coalition forces as it is occupation, it was interesting to read this paragraph from Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq, which describes all the colonisation activities Indians were involved in.

The men and materials provided by the subcontinent were a crucial pillar of [Britain’s] global colonial hegemony. Post-slavery, poor Indian peasants were encouraged to uproot themselves, across the ocean and work the plantations of Trinidad and Guyana; clerks were despatched to help administer East and South Africa; Sikhs and Gurkhas were used to crush the Boxer rebellion in China and turbulence elsewhere. Later, Indian troops were used to good effect in both world wars as well as in the colonisation of the Arab world during the inter-war period. The establishment of the imperial beach-heads in those days required gunboats(naval supremacy) plus Gurkhas. In 1917 the British, with the help of colonial soldiers from India took Jerusalem and Baghdad.[Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq]