With the arrival of the European colonists, came new mythic values: rationality, industrialisation, modernity. The Age of Reason had transformed Europe of the 17th century. Life thereafter was never the same. Great strides were made in the sciences. Reason was venerated as man’s highest faculty.

The presence of the British affected India in many ways. Perhaps the most important change of all was the establishment of the Indian Railways in the 1850s. Soon, distant parts of the Indian subcontinent were linked together with ties of steel. For though the English, like the Dutch and Portuguese, first came as traders, as the decades passed the scattered trading posts of the East India Company began to assume the dimensions of the greatest colonial empire the world has ever seen. And India came to be known, with good reason, as the Jewel in the Crown.