The Initiative

Why It Matters

How 200 years of colonial rule turned the world's richest economy into one of its poorest — and what that inheritance means today.

From the East India Company's monopolies to the 2025 India–UK Free Trade Agreement — what continues, and what has genuinely changed.

On the Kohinoor, the global repatriation movement, and what museums owe a country whose art they still hold.

The colonial laws India inherited, and the slow, contested process of writing them out of the statute book.

At 190, is India still living inside the education system Macaulay designed — and is it decolonising it, or extending it?

The great colonial famines of the 19th and 20th centuries — consequence of empire, or instrument of it?

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