Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

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> It is actually amazing how little British folks today know about their own historical misdeeds, they may accept the issues towards USA and other countries but tend to downplay atrocities magnitudes higher in India and other countries

To add to this, it's not just the British. The Portuguese, French, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish (among others) colonized parts of India long before the British did, and the Portuguese and French also kept their colonies in India much longer. When people talk about India's independence in 1947, that's just referring to the independence of British India. The French stayed until 1962, and the Portuguese held their colonies until 1975.

Amusingly, most Portuguese and French people I've talked to under the age of forty[0] or so are genuinely shocked to learn this.

On the other hand, most British people are apparently proud of their colonial plundering[1], so I guess everyone has a long way to go still.

(P.S. If you're thinking of responding to this with a comment about how the British "improved" India by industrializing it, or all the "benefits" India got from being plundered for 450 years, please save us all the trouble and don't. These are typical revisionist talking points that are easily debunked as ahistorical with some basic research, and they're put forth to distract from the sheer volume of wealth that was stolen, the amount of infrastructure that was destroyed by colonial regimes, the genocides and other war crimes that were committed by the colonizing countries, and so on. For most of recorded history, India (Bengal in particular) was the world's largest economy - over 25% of the world's GDP[2] - and every discussion that attempts to rationalize that loss after colonization without recognizing the value that was destroyed, stolen, or outright murdered ultimately into revisionist white supremacist history, which is not what HN is for.)

I know I'll get eventually downvoted for this, because talking about the brutality and legacy of European colonialism is always unpopular on HN for obvious reasons, but it's important enough that it needs to be said.

[0] ie, young enough that this wasn't in their lifetimes

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-people...

[2] https://www.coursera.org/learn/passport-to-india/lecture/uYU...

> If you're thinking of responding to this with a comment about how the British "improved" India by industrializing it, or all the "benefits" India got from being plundered for 450 years

I once overheard my white coworker say, that the British did India a huge favor, by bringing them English. It was in his belief that back then, the Indians were just killing each other for fun. So the British did them a huge favor by colonizing them.

And because of that, today, India is a major software player for outsourcing, all thanks to the British for colonizing them, and bringing them English.

I sat there thinking to myself, this is unbelievable. I didn't want to talk politics in a business setting, so I ignored it.

The British destroyed a civilization. Enslaved a generation. And enriched themselves in the process. But all that is swept under the rug, because they brought English to their colonies.

In NL plenty of people feel roughly the same about Surinam.

If westerners think that, I can understand. Unfortunately, lot of Indians think the same way, that the British invasion was good for India since they gave us the railways and some other stuff. I don't know much history, but seeing how they destroyed India and killed millions (through famines), I can't wonder how brainwashed these Indians are.

Its not brainwashing as much as lack of a good education or doing some basic individual research. Most of my Indian friends have little interest in history, and accept tidbits like this as fact and don't think much about it.

> Most of my Indian friends have little interest in history, and accept tidbits like this as fact and don't think much about it.

The attitude is empirically far less prevalent in India than it is in modern-day England, so it's not as simple as a matter of education.

When things like the bengal famine happen because of just diverting India's supply chain to the WWII how the F* do you put up with something like that. If you haven't seen it already read the wikipedia entry[1] and pause and think for a moment, they denied food shipments for almost 2 full years in a famine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

It's not just one famine. There have been many. It's estimated that anywhere from 10 to 40 million died in these alone. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-35-millio...

"For most of recorded history, India (Bengal in particular) was the world's largest economy - over 25% of the world's GDP[2]"

You mean in those parts of recorded history when everyone was dirt-poor, only Bengal had more people? I've read my Maddison, India was no better than anyone else at the time.

Sorry, what does %GDP have to do with per capita GDP in the context of the comment, beside the size of population?

EDIT: I'm trying to highlight the fact that preindustrial productivity is a function of population size and therefore per capita GDP is not really a good measure in that context.

No, but explains a part of the decrease of those 25% once productivity stopped being a function of population size in at least a part of the world. Of course one has to recognize the values destroyed by western influence, otherwise the story will be far from complete, but I found the mention of those 25% rather loaded. One can study the past development of societies without being "a revisionist". It is as much possible to push for cheap apologetic revisionism as it is to get allergic reactions and to dismiss perfectly valid opinions as apologetic revisionism needlessly. Most of the time, post scripta to the effect of "BTW, don't respond with things that I won't like" seem like warning lamps to me, regardless of the topic.

From a moral perspective the point still stands, cheap exploitation and subjugation resulted in the current divergence. If the two societies diverged as a result of merely the technological and scientific advances but nothing more the yes your criticism is warranted. Long story short, someone had a better beat stick, nobody's is denying that, but the atrocities and exploitation still remain.

Imagine invading a country to essentially control it's natural resources. Thanks goodness we have moved on from that sort of behaviour and now we need some kind of moral reason (e.g war on terror) to do this to other countries (e.g. Iraq).

Have we really? Or did we simply move to more insidious policies like forcing "free trade treaties" and such?

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