Can you proofread my essay?

It's about Indian imperialism and I'm not an amazing writer. Will you help?

Britain should not have imperialized India. The effects on Indians and their culture were too massive and devastating to be justified by telegraph lines and railroads. Some of these effects included the destruction of Indian religion and culture, bankrupting India’s economy, and not giving Indians proper representation in the government of India. The British outlawed many Hindu customs and were insensitive to the beliefs of Hindus and Muslims by forcing them to taste pork and beef on their ammunition cartridges. The British also made the Indian textile industry obsolete by introducing their own textiles that were manufactured and sold for much cheaper. They also used the land of India for their own gain and made sure that native Indians had no say in what happened to their homeland.

While they were in India, the British uprooted many important parts of Indian culture. “Traditional practices and beliefs were placed in doubt and reevaluated” (“British”). The British had no right to take away important Indian ideals and edit them to their liking. One aspect of Hinduism that the English tried to take away from Indians was sati, where Indian wives threw themselves into the funeral fires of their husbands. This act may have seemed wrong to Europeans, but that gave them no reason to change it to their own likings. The British did other insensitive things as well, for example, when the British army introduced the new Enfield rifle, it required the soldiers to bite off the end of cartridges that were softened with a combination of beef and pork lard. “Having oral contact with this material was insulting to both Hindu and Muslim, but the British showed remarkable inconsiderateness in ruthlessly punishing those soldiers who refused to contravene religious boundaries and bite the cartridges” (“Indian”).

The British also took away much of the Indian’s self-sufficiency (Savidis). Before the English took over, the Indians had a thriving cottage textile industry. Then, when the British came in, they imported British Textiles made in factories. The mass-produced textiles’ prices were too low for the cottage industries to compete with and made them go out of business (Vella). The British also caused famines, “claiming tens of millions of lives, as the priority of commercial agriculture for http://worldhistory.abc-clio.com/Analyze/Display/1551728?cid=20&webSiteCode=SLN_HMOD&returnToPage=%2fAnalyze%2fDisplay%2f1551728%3fcid%3d20&terms=imperialism+in+india&token=26C58660ADA7366E522B95BE228D09CC&casError=False depleted local food supplies” (Hodge). The British also killed many Indians by enlisting more than a million of them in World War I.

Finally, the British deprived the Indians of any representation in the government. Rarely was an Indian, Hindu or Buddhist, put into the Indian Civil Service. In fact, even “by 1914, only 5% of the Indian Civil Service included actually Indians” (Einfield 104). The English abused this absolute power over the Indians to their advantage. For example, partitioning unified states and putting together two cultures in one state that didn’t belong to each other just so English power could be enforced more efficiently (Savidis).

An individual defending the British presence in India may say that the English educated and prepared Indians for their own ruling. This fact is false because “229,000,000 of the 248,000,000 inhabitants of British India were illiterate” (Einfield 129). That means that 92% of India remained illiterate after the Raj.

The British imperialism of India was a horrible thing and had devastating effects on India as a whole. Some of these effects included the destruction of Indian religion and culture, bankrupting India’s economy, and not giving Indians proper representation in the government of India. Overall, it is clear that British imperialism in India and imperialism generally was a very negative thing and did not bring enough benefits to the world to outweigh the evil things it created.