Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

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I am also from the Indian subcontinent. A lot of this derives from the fact that the British uprooted a bunch of existing monarchies, replaced them with Governmental institutions run according to Anglo-Saxon norms, and then left rather suddenly in 1947 saying “You run it” to a set of countries with geographical and population size comparable to Europe; with equivalent if not more linguistic and cultural diversity.

I think colonialism gets blamed because it's the closest external thing in time that can be blamed. Counterexamples like Singapore get bandied around, but the difference between a state the size of Singapore and something like India or Bangladesh is staggering enough to make the comparison essentially useless.

It is an interesting thought experiment to imagine what the consequences would have been of a more gradual transition away from British rule in the Indian subcontinent. My imperfect amateur historical study makes me think it would have been a net positive, but potentially would have led to partition into at least 5-6 different independent states before they did leave for good.

My point is that India and Bangladesh were colonies as well, but they are quite a bit more functional than your typical African country.

You have a fair point that African countries have more diversity than Singapore, but that begs the question-what makes diversity a bad thing?

> You have a fair point that African countries have more diversity than Singapore

I don't say anything about African countries in my comment, that must be from upthread.

But I would think that most African countries are also at a scale different from Singapore's; enough to just make Singaporean solutions unworkable. This does not mean that it's a bad thing, just different. If one were to press the point, I'd say that scaling anything up is just harder – this applies to nation states just as it does to websites.

> India and Bangladesh were colonies as well, but they are quite a bit more functional than your typical African country.

I am not entirely sure this is true if you consider the rural parts. Rural India (with 65% of the population) has more in common with most African countries than it does with anywhere in the West. A large part of this is due to the fact that the British never had any interest in settling there in large numbers; and consequently never invested significant efforts into building infrastructure for the rural parts. They preferred to strike deals with existing power structures that allowed them to profiteer off the land. I could reasonably see African countries having similar problems given their relatively low population density in the 19th and 20th centuries.

I remember reading the memoirs of an ICS official (Asok Mitra, not the Marxist economist but the chief census commissioner) around the time of Partition that claimed British leaving was worse for the rural areas at that time because at least they inspected and made sure public services were working.

There are obvious problems with comparing a continent to a country but most African countries have lower poverty rates than India.

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