Look, explanations of complex stuff that happened is basically what historians do. The fact of the matter is, the EIC policies led to an enormous rebellion that ultimately resulted in the Crown taking over in India, and the EIC ending its independent existence. The EIC policies were terrible and very heavy handed, here is one example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_British_salt_tax_in_India
(And it's not like it was not known by this point that people hated salt taxes, they could have just asked the French about how the gabelle worked out for them.)
I am not sure in what sense it can be said that the EIC used a 'light touch' in India, unless that phrase can mean basically anything you want it to mean.
The Dutch EIC in Indonesia was much better (but then the Dutch were much better about free trade than the English. The Dutch idea was always to be super efficient about maritime trade and thereby drive others out of a market, the English idea was always to let things run and put tariffs on them. That sounds like a 'light touch' policy, but in fact this always got them into trouble, see also the Molasses Act.)
Look, explanations of complex stuff that happened is basically what historians do. The fact of the matter is, the EIC policies led to an enormous rebellion that ultimately resulted in the Crown taking over in India, and the EIC ending its independent existence.
I suspect we should not use "fact of the matter" to describe counterfactual claims. You know how hard the problem of inferring causal knowledge from statistical data is, and specifically, how difficult it is to differentiate between different counterfactual hypotheses. (A says that a pla...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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