New research on the cost of colonization to India
aljazeera.com
aljazeera.com
1) The 5% return that produced the $45T figure is significantly higher than the expected return on capital for the vast majority of that period(which includes risk and is not comparable to modern returns). Furthermore, there would be no place to put that money to try to extract that return. The notion that the 18th century even had a safe positive return on capital for large periods of time for proto-investors is dubious to say the least.
2) The timeline doesn't fit for claiming that colonial India dramatically benefited the imperial center or periphery. The UK was industrializing and ahead of the rest of Europe before revenues from India are supposed to have made a difference yet fell behind countries like Germany(which lacked any colonies until the late 19th century) even as revenues from India were supposedly diverted. The periphery is no better, Canada and Australia fell behind the US even with the supposed surplus from India.
3) I'm skeptical that diverted taxes from a mostly agricultural society like India could have produced the bonanza suggested in this article. Existing Per capita taxes would have been onerous enough and not much more could have been meaningfully extracted from the peasantry. A pre-modern society has enough problems with basic economic management and political stability; sustaining a massive bureaucracy necessary to collect taxes without rents diverted to local elites doesn't make a lot of sense.
4) As an addendum to (3) the early East India Company lacked the ability to even administer the country without the cooperation of elites(which required the dispersal of rents). The later imperial bureaucracy necessary to administer India was by all accounts quite expensive. There just isn't the gigantic return form skimming off taxes that is suggested in the article.
Britain and the US really industrialized in the mid 1800s ( although britain loves to pretend it did in the 1700s ). Parts of europe followed soon after. Japan industrialized in the late 1800s. India ( and china ) industrialized after ww2 - india much more slowly than china due to its democratic and bureaucratic baggage. For more than 100 years, india was prevented from industrializing by britain. You can't ignore that significant opportunity cost.
Also, you are wrong when you say colonial "adventure" had nothing to do with industrialization. Excess capital and excess resources are the prerequisites for national industrialization. British industrialization was funded by opium money from china and resources from india. The need for resources is why japan and germany sought to create empires for themselves. It was a necessity to industrialize.
Having said that, I don't think you can honestly calculate the costs of colonization because there are so many factors involved. Would india have been able to follow meiji japan's or even mao's china's example and industrialize? We can say that india lost a lot due to british imperialism, but I doubt we'll ever know exactly how much. At best, it's just a guess.
But something like pre-1850s hermit kingdom Japan is another possibility. And the hermit kingdon's share of the world's pie would have declined greatly, too, with nobody to blame.
Certainly lots of cotton mills got built in the late 19th C, in both Japan and India, and all using the same off-the-shelf technology, and often the same capital. There's lots of interesting detailed work comparing them, and tracking things over the decades. And while I'm not an expert, I don't think it supports any very simple ideas of good guys / bad guys.
For example, here's a link: https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
Japan is a bit of an aberration. It was the only non-western country to industrialize early.
Now, India might have done so also, had it somehow avoided industrialization yet maintained contact with industrializing countries. But, a counterpoint to this is that India basically didn't industrialize after independence either. Only when the "License Raj" was done away with several decades later did India start to grow quickly. (In other words, mere absensce of colonization was not sufficient for growth)
British went their for cheap raw material, cheap labour, and cannon fodder soldiers.
I don't know why people try to use these crazy discount factors on such long time horizons. I feel like it should be pretty easy. The currency of the time was in precious metals. So, we can just revalue the gold and silver in kilos from 1700 in dollars for 2018.
Still, this enormous number is probably in the ballpark.
I used to wonder what good it did by musing over past losses this way. As someone born and raised in India, I felt very acutely the feeling of loss, not just in economy but perhaps the well being and scientific progress that just didn’t happen because of this. I’m still not sure how to deal with it, but research such as this at least helps in ensuring that the truth is spelt out and hopefully something that we learn from and not repeat in the future.
We actually have numbers on all this stuff, e.g. you can track a slow decline in day-labor wages, and IIRC (around Delhi maybe?) they decline slowly from about 1600 to 1800. There are comparable-sized rises and falls in other parts of the world, too. But all very low by modern standards.
Only with industrialisation did this change, and it lagged a bit -- the first gains typically allowed a population boom, without dragging down income as would previously have occurred.
We're not comparing 1600's wages to today, we're comparing them to wages in that era. Of course this was a pre-industrialized society, but it wasn't a society mired in poverty as most people imagine it to be.
The huge differences (factors of 10, even 100) arose only later, because of some pulling ahead.
Have you read the memoirs of Hiuen Tsang? India was exceptionally rich before the invasions of both the Moghuls and the British (and other Western powers). It is not to be taken lightly when the British regarded India as the "Jewel in the Crown"[1].
1: https://sites.google.com/site/imperialismindia/home/economic...
"Taghaza was a commercial centre and awash with Malian gold, though Ibn Battuta did not form a favourable impression of the place, recording that it was plagued by flies and the water was brackish"[1]
Read the account of Ibn Babuta, he criticized a town not in India
But his extensive travel within India never made him write something similar about India.
And, India got partitioned into 3 countries, all of which have spend insane amounts of resources fighting each other when that same could have been spent on economic development and other hostile neighbors of the unified India would have been smaller in size to be a threat.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_economy_of_the...
This is a huge simplification of the history of the Indian subcontinent. The British are the architects of the new boundary lines, but they are also the architects of what is now a unified country, India. Indian subcontinent as a unified entity prior to the arrival of the British as a major colonizing force in India is a lie. India was quite divided before that, which made it easy for them to play their little game of "divide and rule".
None of this absolves them of responsibility, but this over-simplified statement irks me, as it is a gross misrepresentation of the politics of the Indian subcontinent prior to the British.
The fact that entire region was called Bharat escapes you I think. Just before British India was centrally organized and ruled by Mughals and Marathas so your argument does not stand.
As far as "divide and rule" is concerned, due to the vastness of India regional leadership was always delegated. British utilized this structure to their advantage.
I don't think that important fact inherently implies a unity that was never there. The(roughly defined) region called "Europe" has never been under the control of a unitary state or empire, even in the times of the Romans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire#/media/File:Roman...
Delegation is not the same as "divide and rule". There was active animosity amongst these provinces. The British played Bengal and Punjab against each other, for example. The Marathas did resist the British in their own strongholds, but they never centrally ruled an undivided India. It was a big empire nonetheless.
There was a concept of a united India/Hindustan/Bharat/Aryavart in Ancient times.
The Marathas never controlled an "undivided India" given the extent of their empire at it's peak: https://www.mapsofindia.com/history/maratha-empire.html
Not to mention, even Akbar did not have the North east and the southernmost parts of India.
The rise of the Sikh empire, and the Deccan sultanate also limited the extent of the later Mughal and Maratha kingdoms.
I did not question that these empires had their time. But the notion of undivided India as united as one under the Mughals at the time right before the British arrived is wrong. Ancient times do not affect contemporary affairs, or in this case affairs of 1750s are not affected by the Maurya dynasty's claim on some version of modern day India/Pakistan/Bangladesh.
Video: https://youtu.be/QN41DJLQmPk?t=628 (at 10:28).
Some other interesting time lines from a union of India perspective from this video:
Maurya Empire: 270 BCE (at 2:01, https://youtu.be/QN41DJLQmPk?t=122)
Delhi Sultanate: 1344 (at 8:44 https://youtu.be/QN41DJLQmPk?t=524)
Edit: Found another video that matches with the above video regarding Mughal Empire: https://youtu.be/wYu2jyVTSc8?t=76 (at 1:16).
The peaks were quite short-lived, often only one ruler's lifespan (natural or otherwise). There were long gaps between. There were many competing powers.
And that's OK! I mean, are we sure that the world in which some Aurangzeb figure won, and created a united (persian-speaking, 100% sunni) subcontinent, is a better place?
Industrialization happened in this time period. India did not industrialize as rapidly or to the same extent as Europe and the US.
Share of world income is a zero sum game. Some of that decline is made up for by increased income elsewhere. The absolute income in India certainly did not decrease from 1700 to 1952.
These numbers would be more useful with a comparison to China, Russia and Japan over the same time period (all of which industrialized later than Europe and the US).
WWII offered a source of capital (people stashing their money into a neutral state, and many never asking for it back) and some industrialization, but the Switzerland we think of today is really a product of the late 50s/1960s.
Economic growth in europe only really took off to levels we think of as "today" after 30+ years of intense postwar growth. It was rich before that, but still very rural. Movies of the era are quite revealing.
I an genuinely curious if there is an argument against Switzerland et al being counterexamples to the colonialism/wealth argument. The strongest one I can think of would be that Switzerland et al benefitted from proximity to capital and to the new techniques discovered by capital.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-...
And conversely, all those fabulous silver mines didn't exactly leave the Spaniards with a head-start in modernisation.
India consisted of more than 3 "countries" prior to the arrival of the British.
Technically two, one of which had non-contiguous parts which later had a falling out.
Which they weren't forced too. That's not a "cost" of colonization but a cost of not choosing another path.
There was definitely religious violence in South Asia before colonization, but the scale and depth definitely increased during and after.
* had the largest supply of slaves[1],
* tried to levy taxes on American tea,
* broke China and forced them to buy their own Opium
* invented concentration camps to defeat the Dutch Boers[2]
* used Gibraltar as a control point for the entire Mediterranean
* erased most Tasmanian Aboriginals [3]
did something dodgy in India ??
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_s...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps
BTW there's an Indian connection there too (I assume you're talking about the Boston Tea Party).
The cause of that episode was the British eliminating the tax on tea and at the same time giving the East India Company a tea monopoly in the North American colonies.
When I was in school in Boston the official line was that the tea party demonstrators were smugglers upset at the monopoly and reduction in tax (the New England coastline is well structured for and remains a big smuggling area, especially heroin and human trafficking).
I have no idea if the story is still told that way in the Boston schools. I was also taught that the clever colonists used to hide behind the bushes and pop out to shoot the stupid British marching down the streets in their bright red uniforms. I know that by 1970 that narrative had been replaced as the guerrilla warfare in Viet Nam was now being presented as "unfair"
None of which is a criticism of the USA or UK, merely a comment on how our narratives "evolve".
I don't think that guerilla warfare is considered "unfair" by the US military today (can't speak for the 70s), the US still encourages it when it suits them, especially when encouraging regime change. Asymmetrical warfare requires guerilla tactics by the less conventionally powerful armies against more conventional armies.
The schools conveniently ignored the Native American assistance in fighting the British, and overstate the actual impact of the peasant rebellion. It was an organized army with discipline founded on the French that really cemented the colonists win over the British. George Washington really is one of the few Americans that was as amazing as his legend, if not more so.
Americans also really don't give enough credit to the French for their assistance. We sort of gloss over that point, however we did at least return the favor in WW1 and WW2 as well as taking over the mission in Vietnam. So I think I pretty much wrote all of this to agree that yes our narratives definitely evolve.
Have an awesome weekend.
i wrote it at a bus stop after work in London, nothing snarky intended.
ive used bullet points A LOT in many comments over the years.
it used to be “citation needed” back in the day, so i still supply them.
Unfortunately, there's a sense in which it still makes no difference because the comment fits the flamewar-starting pattern whether you were posting in that spirit or not. But I would have phrased my reply differently if I'd read you more precisely.
okay... looked. you seem to be someone who wants to and is entrusted with policing HN.
So I will say, that i did not intend as a snark at all, more light hearted banter.
if you check my posting history you will find a track record of formatting my posts similar to this.
i did not have a stick-it-to-the-english pamphlet lying around that i cut n pasted. its all stuff that ive actually come across.
and it did add to the article as far as i can tell
Modern day Indians do acknowledge that history is complex, nuanced and there were many factors that led to the colonization of India.
However the sheer ignorance of a lot of Western folks to British and other colonial atrocities is alarming. For them the history starts and ends with their own lens and seldom beyond the same Greek/ Roman/ Judeo mythology and/or history.
It is funny for example when so many call the modern no system the Arabic no system when in fact the Arabians merely took it from India and exported it westwards (an important feat)
There is a reason why Western civilization became so powerful - conquering large territories (Aus, Ca, NZ etc.) , resources, imposing their culture.
I really commend the self respect Chinese have in this regard. They consider this century as the one where China regains its lost glory. I hope India can manage to become economically better although i doubt it would ever come even close to China.
> It was a scam - theft on a grand scale. Yet most Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat.
This sounds needlessly circuitous. Money is fungible, so how is this different from saying the British overtaxing them?
The actual book this article refers to doesn't seem to push such a weird argument (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/dispossession-deprivation-and-...).
I think the other two thirds, the part not spent within India, was a far greater problem. That was the 'stolen' money, the money removed from the country.
Because the British never spent their own hard earned money. It isn't fungible when you take someone's money from one hand and return back a small amount with the other hand without doing any measurable amount of work to have earned the money in the first place. How hard is that to understand?
As a counter, would you be okay with your Government taking a portion of your money as tax and using only a small portion of it for your benefit and keeping the rest to be distributed amongst the elected representatives? Obviously not. This has nothing to do with overtaxation because I am sure people wouldn't have resisted if that money was reused for common good. But it wasn't the case. The money was used to fill up British coffers to be used in fighting World Wars (for which by the way, Indian soldiers were forced to take part in with not much recognition).
By the way, the Empire taxed everything. They did not even spare Salt! That should put some perspective.
This is a surprising recent notion. The Mughals sure didn't conquer territory to tax it for the peasant's benefit -- the entire purpose of conquering land was to extract taxes from these peasants, for yourself & your army.
Indian economist Amartya Sen is fond of pointing out that although India has no shortage of hungry people, it hasn't had a famine since the departure of the British. But he's also keen to point out that the significant difference is that the average Indian person now gets to vote governments in and out of power. This wasn't the case under the British, but it also wasn't the case when Shah Jahan dedicated more tax revenue to monumental architecture and unsuccessfully attempting to conquer Qandahar than resolving the Deccan Famine.
the so called "sir" winston churchill was after all a mass murderer in a sense. of course it is about power and exercising power, India should have fought back harder to protect itself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/winst...
Showing up unasked and extract taxes to fund projects in your own interest, only some of which are even of use to locals, is unambiguously theft.
If tax money of the tax payers of India is used to buy good/services for the tax payers of Britain. How is it not defrauding?
My tax money is used to buy goods/services for people in other states. Not only is that not considered fraud, it is a fundamental reason taxes exist.
To my point, I’m not supporting Empire, but in the time of the Raj, the East India Company was tightly held by British aristocrats and was not Britain. In turn Britain as controlled by the state was not the British people. As well as using Indian profits to wreak havoc globally, it was used to maintain dominance in Britain by the state.
[Edited for clarity]
I love this sentence but it implies a huge leap that I am not sure could have happened. Japan was a unitary state for a very long period -- millennia -- thanks in part to its island nature. Sure, there were civil wars, smaller, (non-sovereign!) regional powers and the like but for the majority of the past couple of millennia Japan was independent and unitary.
What would an independent India have been over the same period? The evidence is: fractious. Part of the reason the Persians and the British were able to build huge empires there was that each arrived when previous empires had become weak and where they could exploit differences between smaller states, taking control piecemeal. Note that Alexander the Great was unable to get a significant foothold in the subcontinent, in part because of the size of opposition he faced.
It's better to think of a large region like the subcontinent as being more akin to Europe, where various tiny states amalgamated to form medium-sized countries. Which is something that I think could have happened, and would have been much better for India than the British Raj. But the much tinier Japan is probably not an appropriate model.
And to win World War I & II.
My American girlfriend was shocked when she picked this up and glanced through it -- she had had no idea. Her understanding, such as it was, was entirely from British TV.
Nothing have changed in principle since then, it just slave ownership became "remote".
How many African, South American, Indian gold coins lie under each stone of those beautiful European plazas?
Yes, without that cache flow the humanity might had no Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution as they were so all this is not that black and white. We just need to understand that.
Towards the end of our trip, we visited Queen Victoria’s Memorial Hall. There was a small Museum in 1 corner of that Palace, which had photos and newspaper stories about Calcutta from the time the East India Company arrived to the time they left.
There, I learned that Calcutta was the Capital of the British Raj in India for a very long time. One of the plaques in that museum gave the reasoning for the British Raj for choosing Calcutta as the Capital. Apparently Calcutta was the richest city in India when the East India company arrived. It was flush with natural resources, grains and wealth accumulated by the Rajas and Indian Kings who ruled before. By the time moved their Capital from Calcutta to Delhi and then left India few years later, they’d plunders everything from that City.
Ask any Indian about Calcutta and the first thing they’ll say is how dirty and piss-broke it is. But most don’t know why it is so. I attribute the state of this once great city directly to the British Raj robbing it blind over a century or two.
Delhi on the other hand was a great city, many times over (and sacked, and re-built, by rules of many tongues).
But it's also important to know that when we say an ancient place was rich, we mean that the kings were rich & built big palaces etc. Peasants were poor everywhere in the pre-industrial world, with variations but not enormous ones, like the difference between 500 and 1000 USD/year.
When we say that a modern place is rich, we mean the average guy instead. And, sometimes, that their city is well-run and finds money to spend on public services etc. Which, in my understanding, Calcutta has not been in the last 50 years, compared to other Indian cities. However I would still bet that the median income has increased monotonically.
Auroville in South was plundered and the colonists burnt the forests around it leaving it completely barren. It was recently rebuilt and is still work in progress to return it back to the original state
See my follow up response to this thread.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/theShiva/public-domain/mas...
The only thing incorrect in my original statement was, it was the province of Bengal (now the state?), not Calcutta.
Please read this entire thing. I've typed out the text in the photo verbatin. Last line says it all.
The Colonial Impact
Why did the British make Bengal their chief focus, and Calcutta their Capital? Bengal was India's wealthiest province, for her granary, rich in muslin, silk yarn, and salt petre, products which European trading companies were particularly interested in. Profits were high, and the East India Company saw it as a promising area to invest in.
They were proved right. By the mid-18th century, Bengal is playing a lead role in commerce., It provides the finances to sustain an expanding colonial state, especially after the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, revenue in 1793.
By 1856-7 Bengal alone is contributing 44% of the total revenue from British India. This is 260% more than Bombay. These figures tell us that Bengal is colonial India's most exploited region. Calcutta flourishes as a typical colonial city, linking the hinterland of primary production with plantations and mining resources, and exporting everything for the benefit of an imperial economy witch enriches Britain at Bengal's cost.
> "India's wealthiest province, ... rich in muslin, silk yarn"
i.e. rich in luxury goods, crafts serving the 1%. That's what the company was after, because their entire shipping capacity was like a few modern trucks per year, so only super-valuable goods made sense. (And I think you'll find that the top 1% of Bengalis still live pretty well.)
> "abject poverty ... generations of Indians living on the sidewalks"
i.e. the poorest people. That they were poor in 1650 too wasn't really worth writing down: they were peasants, peasants were poor.
That other provinces contributed so little tax in 1850s is really an indication of how little ruling was going on. Sure they got to paint the whole map pink & keep the french out, but (at that time) the company was only a few thousand people. They weren't exactly overseeing the 5-year plan in every village.
I think I've been to the same museum, BTW. They had a surprisingly honest section about literature, pointing out that Bengali was the first indian language in which serious writing in the vernacular took off. And this was a blending, I'm told you see poems borrowing from oral & scriptural traditions but written in rhyming schemes taken from english poetry of the time.
British ensured the succession to a loyal dynasty which kept making the country poorer by faux socialism and lack of governance skills until Mr. PV Narasimha Rao appeared on the scene and actually did something to gently nudge India onto global stage. Ironically credit still went to the family and he was sidelined as soon as new prince was ready to take over the reign.
And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Caste owe Reparations to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Backward_Class in India since http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/caste-is-no... and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shashi-tharoor/caste-wont-disa...
And check which Caste is looting India? https://www.quora.com/Which-caste-is-looting-India/answer/Ad...
https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/955470121232994304
Outside of India and a couple other examples, though, the “subsequent national success” is of the ex-British colonists, not the colonized people, who are destroyed or marginalized inside what was once their land.
They were side by side in the Americas, too. And while, yeah, disease was a problem for the indigenous people everywhere in the Americas, not all the colonial powers carried out genocidal displacement campaigns starting in the colonial period and lasting well beyond.
Stories about colonialism sometimes get flagged, presumably because they give rise to ideological and (worse) racial and national flamewar. But there have been many on Hacker News' front page over the years, as well.
The thing to watch out for with such perceptions, besides sample bias, is that we're all more likely to notice what we dislike than what we agree with. If a story I like gets flagged, that registers far more strongly than a story I like not getting flagged. So even a perfectly even-handed forum will seem unfair and biased in any area you feel strongly about. Not that HN is a perfectly even-handed forum—but what's going on is a lot more stochastic than these perceptions seem.
Edit: having looked at the story, I think probably what tipped the balance for flags over upvotes was the obviously baity title. Threads are sensitive to initial conditions, and a title like that guarantees a bad thread, regardless of how justified it might be. I've edited the title and turned off the flags.
Let’s face it. The British haven’t always treated others nicely.