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Comment by tosseraccount | Hacker News Reader

Mughal Empire , sectarianism and caste system crippled India, not Britain.

Were the mughals invaders and colonisers like the British? Did they "leave" after their demise? I thought they basically became part of India, especially with their artistic and religious influence on the people.

Mughals were the Mongols who converted to Islam and invaded India.

And they were a small ruling caste that was assimilated by the locals, for the most part.

So the previous comment was quite accurate. The Mughals of Babur were far removed from the Mughals of Bahadur II.

Manchu Qing Dynastsy was foreign invaders that "got assimilated", too. Chinese people were glad to get rid of them and okay with Britain countering their presence.

The revisionism in this thread is incredible. Britain enslaved an entire nation for centuries and you think that didn't cripple India? They will have to pay for their crimes one day.

You should find out what India's share of world GDP and trade was when the british arrived.

Every serious economic paper I've read on the subject suggests that decline in Indian GDP during the colonial years was due to the bottom dropping out of several commodities markets. You seem to be insinuating something else was at work. Do you have anything you could cite?

Mughals: "The psychological interpretations emphasize depravity in high places, excessive luxury, and increasingly narrow views that left the rulers unprepared for an external challenge." [ theory from Wikipedia entry on Mughals. Follow their citations. ]

People were glad to get rid of them and their wars which crippled India.

Britain kicked them out and (mostly) unified India.

I really hate this argument, the change in GDP share is because the West industrialised and the East didn't, before that it was mostly a matter of population, per capita GDP didn't matter so much.

Not to say I have any idea what would have happened without colonialism, but thinking that India would have retained their share of world GDP is naive.

Is it a coincidence that industrial revolution happened in a country which was taking raw material from its colonies at zero cost?

Owning India is what allowed Britain to fund its own development (as well as all its international wars). The british destroyed india's local textile sector (which was world-famous), shipped all the cotton to Britain, and sold clothes BACK to Indians. That's how this industrial revolution happened.

This is what Mahatma Gandhi opposed and encouraged Indians to make their own yarn. That's where his association with the "charkha" and swadeshi movement comes from.

I would agree it's almost certainly true that colonialism and extracted wealth did a great deal to fuel the industrial revolution, but saying that the British pace of industrialization was dependent on India is a different thing from saying that India would have industrialized at the same pace as the West in the absence of colonialism. Leaders and elites frittering away wealth, rather than investing it in economic development, has been the rule rather than the exception for the majority of human civilization, in the West and the East. What makes you think that the Mughals would have suddenly shifted the basis of their social order, to start investing in steam engines rather than palaces, in the absence of the British? The Newcomen engine was invented in 1712, at a time when the East India Company were an irrelevance. Where is the parallel in India?

Just to be clear, I'm not saying pace of development wasn't seriously set back through colonialism, I'm questioning specifically this percentage of GDP argument.

To be fair, the % of GDP argument is really hard to quantify along the axes being used here.

If India wasn't a colony, wealth would not have concentrated in GB, likely slowing Down their development and Maybe even making them more open to local conflicts.

Provided the French or Dutch didn't conquer more of India, and, it's hard to argue that wealth remaining in India would have not have resulted in more trade and local development.

We can definitely say that having someone come to your country, and clearly stop you from building the best product you can build, sell or pruchase, impoverishes your country.

I really hate your argument too. India actually had trade routes all the way upto Britain until and after it was colonized. In fact there is no doubt that India would have taken part in Western industrialization looking at the attitude India had in allowing foreigners to settle in its land. Don't forget that the British never waged a War against India unlike other countries which Britain colonized. They came into India as the "British East India Company" to do trade and business. Wouldn't this trade and business easily influence India to industrialize? So what changed? Why did this company, that had been setup to do trade and business, end up getting it's own private armies, exercise military power and assume administrative functions? Was it part of a bigger plan to actually colonize a country without waging War by infiltrating the country in the guise of a Company and ruling via the Divide and Rule policy? Ask yourself these questions and you'll get your answer. India was always open to new cultures, traditions and advancements before British colonization. You should read about Indian history to know that we even had metal working way before Britain even knew about metallurgy. Read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_metallurgy_in_South...

There is a reason why Britain industrialised first. A lot of it had to do with barring Indians from making manufactured goods in their own country and importing raw materials at artificially low prices. Also Indians were not allowed to own valuable assets like tea plantations etc. Educate yourself before making statements that make no sense

That's prior to the industrial revolution compared to after the industrial revolution. It's the same story with India, Russia and China - during that period the global economy shifted from being overwhelmingly defined by agriculture and other products of manual labour (and therefore being heavily dependent on population) to being defined by industrial production. Britain treated India as an extractive economy, were involved in many abuses and crimes, and certainly held back India's development (the lack of literacy even in the 1940's is the most clear-cut example), but it's an enormous stretch to say that India under the Mughals or the other regional rulers would suddenly have made India into an industrial superpower.

You can see in Russia, in the absence of any colonialism, the enormous struggle which there was to transform an economy dependent on manual labour, and with an elite dependent on feudal social structures, into a modern economy. I would separate the issues of abuses/crimes and the issues of development in the sense that the abuses were perpetrated due to moral failings, of power-hunger, racism, and greed, but development is not just about morality, it's about having the right policy and the right trajectory for society. In terms of development, the really damaging attitude was that India's ancient culture should not be disturbed to make way for industrialization, and this was an opinion shared by many well-meaning British and also Indians, pre and post independence.

The opinion is that the West fueled industrialization with the looted wealth from colonies.

I think that's almost certainly true, but again I'd go back to the example of Russia, where the elite continued to put their wealth principally into competitive status symbols rather than industrialization for almost two centuries after the industrial revolution started. Elites siphoning off wealth for their luxury, rather than investing in society or the economy, has been the rule, not the exception, for the majority of human history, and the Mughals certainly had been doing that in India for centuries before the British arrived. Empiricism and scientific enquiry also got going centuries before industrialization, I admit I don't know much about Indian intellectual life in the 17th century, but did they really have an equivalent of the Royal Society, or of Newton?

India had a more vibrant scientific society than the West. While the West was still figuring out if the Earth was flat or not, Indian scholars had already established that the Earth was not only a spheroid but also determined the age of the Universe (See: https://www.quora.com/What-does-Hinduism-say-about-the-shape... and this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_units_of_time). We even had Metallurgy working way before Britain learnt about working metals. I can go on and on about Indian intellectual life way before Britain came to colonize India but it makes no sense in today's context because most of these facts are either unknown or is of little interest to the West. See what Professor Dean Brown (a scientist from the United States) says about India, Sanskrit and India's Scientific heritage in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Brv2FaOluU

I didn't downvote you, but I do disagree very strongly with what you have written. I was talking about scientific culture in the 17th century and you reply with the achievements of Indian civilization from thousands of years earlier. No one doubts that India is home to one of the great world civilizations, but science is empiricism, it is observation taking precedence over everything else. If this had been created in the Hindu texts we would have settled separate star systems by now. You might as well say that 12th century England had a dynamic scientific culture because they read Aristotle and Galen.

You can't compare Russia to India. India was welcoming to foreigners and integrated their cultures and traditions. It was the same Mughals and other regional rules who allowed the British to setup the "British East India Company" in India. Its unfortunate that the British took advantage of this gesture and misused the opportunity to colonize India. To say that India would not have industrialized without colonization is stretching it too far. India was always open to new endeavors.

Islamic invasion, caste system and colonialism all crippled India.

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