Indian Money for Britain’s African Adventure

In 1868, Britain declared war on the Ethiopian Empire (Abyssinia). An army was dispatched under General Robert Napier to crush the Ethiopians. The cost of this military expedition, amounting to around 600,000 British pounds, a very high sum in those days, was extorted from the starving Indian peasants. Between 1868 and 1870, there was a famine in several parts of British India, and millions were starving to death. But the British used Indian wealth and Indian grains to fund a military adventure in another continent (Africa). They did not impose the burden of this war on their colonies in Canada and Australia because they knew that people of those regions would revolt against such a proposal. The Indian peasants were not politically united in the nineteenth century so they could not stop the British from plundering their country and causing mass starvation.