The
British exerted strong influence in India for a couple of centuries
plus, and the British Isles being the place where these pukka sahibs
came from, there resulted a natural affinity in the local populace for
this fabled land. Thus it was that the post-independence Indian, and
also Pakistani (for a new country had been carved out) leaders had all
been educated in England. The upper classes continued to go to England
for their higher-level education in the professions and the sciences.
Chartered Accountants, doctors, engineers, scientists and so forth
returned with British diplomas all set to reap their financial rewards.
Post WW2 however, there was another form of traffic -- manpower. Having lost many young men and older ones in the war, there was a shortage of labor in Britain and it looked to the colonies: West Indians, Pakistanis and Indians with little education streamed in to seize the opportunities of higher wages and a better life in the fabled mother country. Their children and grandchildren, born in the UK, prospered further...
So it is that Rishi Sunak, ethnic Indian, heads the current English government; Humza Yusaf, ethnic Pakistani, is the first minister of Scotland; and Leo Varadka, whose father was Indian, is the Irish leader. It is a changed world where once subjugated peoples begin to rule the subjugators.
Then
there was indentured labor where the British transported Indian labor,
under contract usually for five years, to its other colonies to work on
plantations: sugar in the West Indies and in remote islands like Fiji;
coffee in East Africa, tea in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); rubber in Malaya
(now Malaysia); food crops in South Africa, although one might add that
the late 19th-century Boer war diminished British influence there.
Along with the West Indies, there was British Guiana where Indians also settled. Independence from Britain in the 1960s and merger with Dutch Guiana resulted in the new country of Suriname on the northern coast of South America.
One side
effect of major consequence was how the mistreatment of Indians awakened
Gandhi, a young lawyer, to fight against colonialism first there, then
later in his home country of India. Eventually, the British left many
of these places.
In the wake of their departure, the settlers, or rather descendants, found their privileged positions in society no longer tenable so many returned to Britain, somewhat bewildered by the alien (to them) culture of a modern western industrial country.
It was a three-cornered trade that brought wealth to Britain in the 19th century: Manufactured goods were sent to West Africa, from where slave ships took their human cargo to the West Indies and particularly the southern United States for the arduous work of planting and picking cotton, that is the valuable cotton bolls.
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