Yeah they shouldn't follow that history.
The US also had slavery.
The US also had slavery.
Are you under the impression that China didn't?
I was trying to address the idea that since the US did bad things in the past, it's ok for other nations to do them too.
Giving each country a fair shot at developing even if they didn't happen to get on that ramp at the same time as some Western countries is a good goal.
At the same time, that's not such a vital principle that we should sacrifice other moral or pragmatic imperatives to get it. China may have gotten a late start, but that doesn't give them the right to ignore everything we've learned since then about a country's obligations to its people and the world.
If you don't want the developing world to follow in the West's footsteps, perhaps we should share some of our wealth with them? Would that be a more palpable alternative?
Earlier today, a study was posted on HN about how the British Empire plundered ~$50T (inflation-adjusted) of wealth from India over it's colonial history. If you want to even the playing field with the developing world, we have a lot of reparations to look forward to.
We are, it's called the global economy, and it has performed a wealth transfer of unprecedented scale these last decades.
> we have a lot of reparations to look forward to.
Colonial reparations are complete crock, because they are based on counterfactual history speculations, and there are absolutely no concrete limits on those.
The Roman empire obviously plundered the British isles for inflation-adjusted astronomical amounts during its colonial history, should modern-day Italians pay reparations to England?
It's absurd.
How do you put a value on that?
Also, many Indians were killed resisting the colonial invasion, and their descendants are not living today as a result, but would have if the course of history hadn't changed.
How do you put a value on that?
You can twist yourself silly arguing these things back and forth, because there are no physical limits. There are no principles to fall back on, there's only human imagination, you're free to dream up whatever pricetag you want on them.
And that is why colonial reparations are ridiculous.
India's share of the world economy went from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950. India's GDP (PPP) per capita was stagnant during the Mughal Empire and began to decline prior to the onset of British rule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India_under_the_Bri...
> infrastructure
Infrastructure that was paid for, and built by the people of India.
> medicine
Then why did life expectancy in British India go down during the colonial period? And why were millions of people dying in famines, all the while British India was a net exporter of food, to the rest of the empire?
> industry
How did countries that did not get colonised ever manage to industrialize?
> language
What, did Indians communicate with eachother through chest-thumping, and grunts, before someone had the bright idea of teaching them how to speak English? Christ on crutches... This reads a bit like satire.
Where do you go from there, exactly?