" This British practice, previously unknown in India, caused long-lasting damage. The historian Jon Wilson has argued that India had a dynamic economic and political order—‘a society of little societies’—where constant negotiation between the rulers and the ruled was the norm. India’s villages were not self-reliant republics that lived in blissful isolation. They were networked and connected, and it was the destruction of Indian industry that forced people to retreat and focus on farming, creating both a more agrarian society and the problem of peasant dispossession. "

― Shashi Tharoor , An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India