India that 'was' Bharat was like other colonies; sometimes even in a greater extent made to look and feel inferior. This process is a continuous one which is executed through intellectual, cultural and most importantly through economic methods: the prime one being manipulation of monetary policies and systems. Currency was in vogue only in higher levels of administration and that too not as fiat currencies but actual gold and silver standard systems.

A small reflection:

Gold exchange standard "scam":

 gold  standard is a system in which gold coins do not circulate, but the authorities agree to pay gold  on demand at a fixed price in exchange for circulating currency.

No country currently uses a gold standard as the basis of its monetary system,

 Fiat  currency

 In 1862, US government paper money was issued and given legal tender status. It was a fiat money (not convertible on demand at a fixed rate into specie). These notes were called “Greenbacks”; the United States had abandoned a commodity (gold) standard

Congress passed the Gold Reserve Act on 30 January 1934; the measure nationalized all gold by ordering the Federal Reserve  to turn over their supply to the U.S. Treasury. In return the banks received gold certificates to be used as reserves against deposits and Federal Reserve notes.

The International Monetary Fund was established to help with the exchange process and give foreign exchange to assist nations in keeping their exchange rates fixed.

 Silver

From 1750 to 1870, wars within Europe and war in america as well as an ongoing trade deficit with east indies drained silver from the economies of Western Europe and the United States. so Coins were struck in smaller and smaller numbers, and there was a proliferation of bank and stock notes used as money.(fiat currency)

The United States adopted a silver standard based on the Spanish milled dollar in 1785,   Silver coins struck by the  US government left circulation because of the export of silver to pay for the huge debts taken on by the Federal Government in financing the Revolutionary War in 1770’s

 In1792 the market price of gold was about 15 times that of silver

 In 1844, the Bank Charter Act established that Bank of England notes were fully backed by gold and they became the legal standard. According to the strict interpretation of the gold standard, this 1844 act marks the establishment of a full gold standard for British money.

 Coinage act of 1873 (also known as the Crime of ‘73) that demonetized silver. This act removed the 412.5 grain silver dollar from circulation. Subsequently silver was only used in coins worth less than $1 (fractional currency). With the resumption of convertibility of the U.S. dollar into gold at a fixed price ($20.67 per ounce) on June 30, 1879 the government now paid its debts in gold, accepted greenbacks for customs, and redeemed greenbacks on demand in gold. Greenbacks were now perfect substitutes for gold coins. During the latter part of the nineteenth century the use of silver and a return to the bimetallic standard were recurrent political issues . In 1900 the gold dollar was declared the standard unit of account and a gold reserve for government issued paper notes was established. Greenbacks, silver certificates, and silver dollars continued to be legal tender, and were redeemable in gold

Colonial British East Indies: 

The silver rupee continued as the currency of India through the eic occupation and beyond. In 1835, east India company adopted a mono-metallic silver rupee; this decision was influenced by a letter written by Lord Liverpool in 1805 extolling the virtues of mono-metallism.

Valuation of the rupee based on its silver content had severe consequences in the 19th century, when the strongest economies in the world were on the gold standard. The discovery of vast quantities of silver in the United States and various European colonies resulted in a decline in the relative value of silver to gold.

 The demonetization of silver by European and North American governments in the early 1870s was the contributing factor. The Coinage Act of 1873 in America was met with great opposition by  mining companies The western US states were outraged—Nevada, Colorado, and Idaho were huge silver producers, The resumption of the US government buying silver was enacted in 1890 with the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. ,  In addition, there were Americans  who advocated the continuance of government-issued fiat money (United States Notes) to avoid deflation and promote exports.

Economic historians  believe that the 1873 depression was caused by shortages of gold that undermined the gold standard,

Since the excess silver availability of 1873, a number of nations adopted the gold standard; however, India remained on the silver standard 

 After its victory in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), Germany extracted a huge indemnity from France,  and then moved to join Britain on a gold standard for currency. France, U.S. and other European  countries followed Germany in adopting a gold standard throughout the 1870s. At the same time, other countries, such as Japan, which did not have the necessary access to gold or those, such as India, which were subject to imperial colonial  policies  which were not allowed move to a gold standard,colonies remained mostly on  silver standard. A huge divide between silver-based and gold-based economies resulted. The worst affected were colonies with silver standard that were forced to trade with their masters with their gold standard. With discovery and deregulation of more and more silver reserves, those currencies based on gold continued to rise in value and those based on silver were declining due to demonetization of silver. For example India which carried out most of its trade with gold based countries, especially Britain, the impact of this shift was profound. As the price of silver continued to fall, so too did the exchange value of the rupee, when measured against pound sterling.

  At the end of the 19th century, the Indian silver rupee went unto a gold exchange standard at a fixed rate of one rupee to one shilling and fourpence in British currency, or 15 rupees to 1 pound sterling. 

 Depression of 1873–79, kicked off by the Panic of 1873

The Long Depression  was a economic recession, beginning in 1873 and running through the spring of 1879. It was the most severe in Europe and the United States,  The United Kingdom is often considered to have been the hardest hit;  

the depression was rooted in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War that hurt the French economy and, under the Treaty of Frankfurt (1871), forced that country to make large war reparations payments to Germany. The primary cause of the price depression in the United States was the tight monetary policy that the U.S. followed to get back to the gold standard after the Civil War. The U.S. was taking money out of circulation to achieve this goal,  Because of the monetary policy the price of silver started to fall causing considerable losses of asset values; by most accounts,

1873 US Trade Dollar -  Cheap silver allowed the United States to create these dollars for primary use in the East. The coins were demonetized in 1876 as the coins were being traded for less than $1 

Between 1870 and 1890, iron production in the five largest producing countries more than doubled, from 11 million tons to 23 million tons, steel production increased twentyfold (half a million tons to 11 million tons), and railroad development boomed.   the price of grain in 1894 was only a third what it had been in 1867, and the price of cotton fell by nearly 50 percent in just the five years from 1872 to 1877, imposing great hardship on farmers and planters. This collapse provoked protectionism in many countries, such as France, Germany, and the United States, while triggering mass emigration from other countries such as Italy, Spain, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. Similarly, while the production of iron doubled between the 1870s and 1890s, the price of iron halved.  The railroads had been a tremendous engine of growth in the years before the crisis,

New Imperialism refers to the colonial expansion adopted by Europe's powers, the United States and, later, Japan during the 19th and early 20th centuries; expansion took place from the French conquest of Algeria until World War I: approximately 1830 to 1914. The period is distinguished by an unprecedented pursuit of overseas territorial acquisitions. At this time, countries focused on building their empire with new developments, making their country bigger through conquest, and exploiting their resources.

The Berlin Conference

Just as the U.S. emerged as one of the world's leading industrial, military and political powers after the Civil War, so would Germany, following its own unification in 1871. Both countries undertook ambitious naval expansion in the 1890s

The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 sought to regulate the coperation between the colonial powers by defining "effective occupation" as the criterion for international recognition of a territory claim (specifically in Africa). The main dominating powers of the conference were France, Germany, Great Britain, and Portugal. They remapped Africa without considering the cultural and linguistic borders that were already established. At the end of the conference, Africa was divided into 50 different colonies. The attendants established who was in control of each of these newly divided colonies.

Towards the end of the 19th century, some of the remaining silver standard countries began to peg their silver coin units to the gold standards of the United Kingdom or the USA. In 1898, British India pegged the silver rupee to the pound sterling at a fixed rate of 1s 4d, while in 1906, the Straits Settlements adopted a gold exchange standard against the pound sterling with the silver Straits dollar being fixed at 2s 4d.

  Australia and New Zealand adopted the British gold standard,

 In 2010 the largest producers of gold, in order, are China, followed by Australia, the US, South Africa and Russia.The country with the largest reserves is Australia.  

Wartime expenditure had reduced the countries of Europe to a state of heavy debt United States of America was not affected, United States of America emerged as a financial superpower and the principal creditor to European countries   The Treaty of Versailles and its conditions had impoverished Germany. Germany lost a lot due to its involvement in the war. The country now owed extremely high debts. However, contrary to expectations, Germany did not pay off their debt by exporting manufactured goods. Instead, Germany paid off its debts by borrowing from the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, paid Germany by borrowing from the United States of America. This created a situation wherein all European countries became dependant on the United States of America.

When the American stock market suffered its first crash on October 24, 1929  leading to a global financial disaster

 

during British rule, there was a major shift from the growth of food grains to the cultivation of cash crops. This change was fostered by India's British rulers in order to provide for the textile mills in England, the most important of them being the cotton mills ofManchester and Lancashire which were fed with raw cotton produced in India. Since 1858, committees were established to investigate the possibility of cotton cultivation in India to provide raw materials for the mills in Lancashire

ndia was one of the foremost suppliers of raw materials during the First World War.  India provided large quantities of iron, steel and other material for the manufacture of arms and armaments. India acted both as a supplier as well as a sprawling market for finished British goods in order to sustain Britain's wartime economy On the eve of the First World War, India was the United Kingdom's single largest market with its exports

The Great Depression of 1929 had a very severe impact on India, which was then under the rule of the British Raj. The Government of British India adopted a protective trade policy which, though beneficial to the United Kingdom, caused great damage to the Indian economy. During the period 1929–1937, exports and imports fell drastically crippling seaborne international trade. The railways and the agricultural sector were the most affected. 

India suffered badly due to the Great Depression. The price decline from late 1929

During the Depression, the British Raj intensified the existing imperialistic economic policies. While these policies protected Britain's economy, they destroyed India's. Because the fall in prices had been higher in India compared to the rest of the world, the price of commodities manufactured in India rose dramatically compared to imports from the United Kingdom or some other country in the world. Farmers who were cultivating food crops had earlier moved over to cash crop cultivation in large numbers to meet the demands of the mills in the United Kingdom. Now, they were crippled as they were unable to sell their products in India due to the high prices; nor could they export the commodities to the United Kingdom which had recently adopted a protective policy prohibiting imports from India.

Rice, wheat, etc., could be used for private consumption but the cash crops which they now cultivated could not be used for private consumption. As there was little sale of indigenous manufactures and limited exports, commodities accumulated and the flow of cash was restricted There was a deficiency of money in many places causing widespread poverty.

The United Kingdom adopted the gold standard in the 1790s. Gold was used to determine the value of the pound sterling throughout the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century. The value of the pound sterling depended on the amount of pound sterling needed to purchase a fixed quantity of gold. At the onset of the First World War, the cost of gold was very low and therefore the pound sterling had high value. But during the First World War, the value of the pound fell alarmingly due to rising war expenses. At the conclusion of the war, the value of the pound was only a fraction of what it used to be prior to the commencement of the war. It remained low until 1925, when the then Chancellor of the Exchequer ( Finance Minister) of United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, restored it to pre-War levels. As a result, the price of gold fell rapidly. While the rest of Europe purchased large quantities of gold from the United Kingdom, there was little increase in the financial reserves. This dealt a blow to an already deteriorating economy. The United Kingdom began to look to its possessions as India to compensate for the gold that was sold.

Due to the drastic collapse of international trade and the very little revenue obtained for it, India could only pay off her home charges by selling off her gold reserves.  From 1931–32 to 1934–35, India exported Rs. 2,330 million worth of gold.

The Great Depression had a terrible impact on the Indian farmer. While there was a steady, uninhibited increase in land rent, the value of the agricultural produce had come down to alarming levels. Therefore, having incurred heavy losses, the farmer was compelled to sell off gold and silver ornaments in his possession in order to pay the land rent and other taxes. 

By 1931, around 1600 ounces of gold were arriving every day at the port of Bombay. This gold intake was transported to the United Kingdom to compensate for the low bullion prices in the country and thereby revitalize the British economy.  United Kingdom was overjoyed as its economy recovered with gold and silver from India.

The Viceroy, Lord Willingdon remarked

For the first time in history, owing to the economic situation, Indians are disgorging gold. We have sent to London in the past two or three months, 25,000,000 sterling and I hope that the process will continue