He meant that British rule in India broke the very principles Britain claimed to stand for at home. He was not saying the rule was bad because it was British; he was saying it was not British enough — that it failed Britain’s own declared standards of justice, liberty and government for the good of the governed.
The hint is the key to the whole phrase. Dadabhai Naoroji was the first Indian elected to the British House of Commons, the elected lower house of the United Kingdom’s parliament, in 1892. So his readers and listeners were British voters and British MPs. Consider the two ways he could have argued:
| Possible argument | How a British Parliament of the 1890s would hear it |
|---|---|
| ‘British rule in India is unjust and should end.’ | Dismissed as the complaint of a hostile outsider |
| ‘British rule in India is un-British — you are doing in India what you would never accept at home.’ | Impossible to dismiss without admitting hypocrisy. It uses Britain’s own moral vocabulary as the measuring rod |
What he put behind the phrase was arithmetic, not anger. His 1901 book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India compiled, from British reports themselves, the wealth estimated to have been drained out of India. Romesh Chunder Dutt did a similar exercise in his Economic History of India. All these studies showed that the colonisers had extracted many billions of pounds. Using British official figures was itself part of the argument: the evidence could not be waved away as Indian exaggeration.