More cartographyposting: The British Raj

This is India at the territorial height of the British Raj, give or take an Anglo-Afghan War or three. Another cartographic entry into the galleryposting, and like the last one, I made it for an eventual video I'll make for my Youtube history channel for apolitical normies.

I have a bit more specific knowledge about this subject than I do about piracy in the Spanish Main, though. My unfinished thesis was about the Mongol khanates, up to and including the Mughal Empire. No, not that Moogle Empire- this Mughal Empire. (Forgive me, there are very few places I can use this pun. I'll see myself out.)

I've always been fascinated by the history of India, and the history of Central Asia, so the Mughal period is like catnip for me. It and the British Raj that came after was a flowering of liberalism, with all the good and bad characteristics that entails. The Mughals gave India an economy so unequal that it would take Jeff Bezos to recreate its like. They had all the money in the world for parties, and even had a long-running court grudge between people who liked cannabis and people who liked alcohol, and this in what was theoretically supposed to be a Muslim theocracy. But they didn't have much money for, say, canals to prevent droughts.

The British were somehow the less liberal of the two foreign invaders; they wrecked the domestic textile industry because they didn't like the competition, but they at least organized more charity for the peasants in drought years, and had the peasants pay for the relief by building canals. Much of Punjab isn't a desert anymore but supports agriculture to this day because of those canals. Less industry, less parties, less starvation. And that's still keeping in mind bastard Churchill's deliberate and unnecessary starvation of 4 million Bengalis during WWII, so when I say that the British were marginally better than the Mughals, that's not a compliment to either party. The Mughals literally did not give a single fuck. They were all about that blood-soaked bling.