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I haven't lived in those times but in British colonies, virtually all positions of power and money were reserved for the people from Britain. You could be Mr. N

I haven't lived in those times but in British colonies, virtually all positions of power and money were reserved for the people from Britain. You could be Mr. Nobody in Worcester, go to India and suddenly turn in to upper class tax officer with bungalow and half dozen servants taking care of your property. On the other hand, a person of Indian origin could have spent large sums of family wealth to get educated in Oxford and have to settle for some lowly clerk when they come back regardless of how well they did. Many freedom movements were actually started by these England-educated Indian people who realized there was no place for meritocracy in British colonies when they came back.

makomk 7y ago
It's worth bearing in mind that the definition of "people from Britain" was probably rather different from the one we'd use today - at least for the lower-end jobs. For example, some of my own ancestors had rather well-paid jobs working on the Indian railways prior to independence that were probably the result of their British status. They'd also lived there for generations and were, by Western racial standards, Indian. (No-one from that branch of the family lives in India anymore. Things got rather ugly when independence happened.)