Talk:Cornwallis in India

Outrageously One-sided and Offensive article

This article seems to have been written by a British colonial apologist using the very same language used in the oppressive exorbitant taxation laws that made India bankrupt and suffer famines and the vast impoverishment of its people. Cornwallis instituted fixed taxes based on a Zamindar's landholding with no bearing to the vagaries of weather, the working conditions of the tiller or the type of crop cultivated. The so called oppressive Zamindars paid 10/11ths of the revenue to the British Raj and kept a paltry but sizeable 1/11ths to themselves leaving nothing to the tiller. The fixed revenues created an incentive for the Zamindar to cultivate cash crops like cotton starving the populace of food crops. Such was the great "reform" of Cornwallis. I forcefully reject the use of the term reform and urge a neutral examination of this article with citations from Nobel prize winning economists such as Amartya Sen. I am appalled by the glowing language used to describe this oppressive war criminal maladministrator.

Cornwallis Triumphant

This is indeed a good article, and I wish I had known about it sooner. I wrote my thesis on Cornwallis in India two years ago. Don't worry: I do not aim to add my original research to this entry, but there is an article by P.J. Marshall that is relevant to Cornwallis's return after the Third Anglo-Mysore War. It explains his popularity and even celebrity upon returning to England. This article is not available online to my knowledge, but here is a link to a PDF of the scanned article I used:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9g6bLfH0geFb0J5QmZCOThNckk/edit?usp=sharing

Marshall, P.J. “Cornwallis Triumphant: War in India and the British Public in the Late Eighteenth Century.” In Freedman, Laurence and Paul Hayes and Robert O’Neill. War, Strategy, and International Politics: Essay in Honour of Sir Michael Howard, 57-74. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

That citation is Chicago style. I am putting this all out there for I am but a Gnome and do not know the ways of contributing and properly citing more substantial content. Is this article even usable? I don't know these things, but would very much like to improve this already good article by explaining, if only briefly, just how popular he was after his victory.

--StringRay (talk) 16:47, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the vote of confidence (I did most of the work on this). As far as I can tell from a brief scan, the Marshall piece looks like a decent source for adding more to the article. Magic♪piano 16:14, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

Okay, I've added a paragraph to the beginning of the 'After India' section. I had a little trouble doing the reference so for some reason Marshall's name is a red link in the references section. Edit away! --StringRay (talk) 22:24, 27 May 2013 (UTC)