Not once the word "colonization" appeared in that text.
Note of course that India was already a colony at the time. The origin of Arabs is 8,000 miles away from where I was born, but I have an Arabic last name. Guess how that happened.
A fairer comparison would be Europe vs India at the time, or England vs the most advanced region of India at the time.
"The most advanced region of Europe" vs "the average region of India" is nitpicking.
Compare that to the Spanish colonialism, where state power indeed mattered more than companies.
Not that makes it better but it's essential to bring it back in the context.
Oh right - Haiti was forced to pay for all the property France last.
Including paying the former slave-masters whose slaves had been freed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_indemnity_controversy
I trust you aren't including that payment as part the money actually lost to France.
Did France ever pay back the damages they did to Guinea before leaving?
> In Guinea, for example, the French destroyed everything they could not take back to their country. They burned food, killed cows, and destroyed buildings and books. These outrageous actions were all because Guinea wanted independence. - https://afritechnews.com/french-colonial-tax/
> In response to the vote for independence, the French settlers in Guinea were quite dramatic in severing ties with Guinea. The Washington Post observed how brutal the French were in tearing down all that they thought were their contributions to Guinea: "In reaction, and as a warning to other French-speaking territories, the French pulled out of Guinea over a two-month period, taking everything they could with them. They unscrewed lightbulbs, removed plans for sewage pipelines in Conakry, the capital, and even burned medicines rather than leave them for the Guineans." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea#Independence_(1958)
How are those counted for in your bookkeeping?
Several African countries are still paying for the infrastructure France built during colonization - infrastructure that of course was forced on them. And France forced its ex-colonies to give France economic advantages that persis, like "France has the first right to purchase any natural resources discovered." and "French companies have dibs on all government procurement bids" - https://afritechnews.com/french-colonial-tax/ .
Are you tracking those on your balance sheet?
Finally, how much money did France lose in French Indochina, a colonie d'exploitation économique, and where did it go?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/lexpansion.lexpress.fr/actualit...
Otherwise google do agood job with french translation
Europe is not the only continent to have been extremely wealthy, and to claim that they did not extract significant wealth from other countries via outright force as well as projection of power, then you are performing quite a lot of revisions on history.
You'll note that I am not claiming that Europe is the only culture to practice colonialism or that they are uniquely evil for doing so - war has been a universal constant in humanity no matter the geographic region. I don't think Europe is more immoral for doing it other countries than anyone doing the same to those in their own country. China has a long history of wars of secession and unification, and I doubt the fact that the people that started the wars were of what we would today call the same nationality was any comfort to those that had their lives ruined or family members killed.
But to ignore the fact that massive quantities of wealth were extracted by European colonialism is absurd. The Dutch East India Company would be worth nearly 8 trillion USD at today's rates. The British East India Company is a bit harder to figure accurately, due to how intertwined it was with the Crown, as well as how much of the earnings left the company nearly immediately for private coffers, and the outrageous level of expenditures during it's period of de facto government in British India. But it made up half of the world's trade for a period - and made quite a lot of Europeans very very rich. If this trade was fair, and not an extraction of wealth, you would have seen this create similar levels of benefits to both parties - but this is plainly not the case.
You simply can't ignore this when trying to answer the question the article claims to be tackling. It's not the sole answer - and there are certainly a multitude of questions around how it came to be that European countries were so brutally "effective" at colonizing - but even if you have decided you want to write an article that focuses on the other factors, it's the sort of thing you really should disclaim and provide at least a basic background on.
Not doing so provides a very flawed picture of the situation, regardless of whether it was done with the intent to create said picture.
No, the majority of the wealth would go to the party that did the work behind the trade, ie those who ran the ships to go around the world. They could buy goods in India for local Indian prices, and then sell in Europe for European prices, that is where the money lies. Not sure how you can argue that it isn't fair to buy goods for their local market value value.
India could have done the same, realized the trade is worth more than the production of the goods and made their own ships and went around the world making much more profits, but they didn't.
"Local market value" - you mean under market value, because they were pressured or outright forced to by their colonizers?
Bengal was one of the richest places in the world, with community owned and driven cotton farming providing wealth for a huge chunk of the population. Then, this "fair trade" with Britain somehow reduced them to poverty and starvation.
Basically everywhere that Europeans colonized that already had wealth, commercial production, etc., saw all that wealth extracted from them, their standards of living drop precipitously, and just general widespread exploitation. Places they colonized that had raw materials, but did not have the same level of wealth or production of goods (Generally because environmental factors, such as lack of navigable waterways or large quantities of arable land, etc.) might have seen this pick up and gained glimpses of new technologies, but again were exploited by the Europeans to extract this wealth from them, and again at rates that would have been well below what would have been natural levels of value if they were to produce and trade things under different circumstances.
The reality of the situation is that colonization is exploitative and has a track record of being universally a Bad Thing for the people being colonized. Over history colonization and conquering is hardly a uniquely European thing, but Europe was ascendant in what ended up being a window of opportunity, with the acceleration of scientific and technological progress allowing them colonize more disparate locations, capitalize on this trade, and ultimately create what is the modern world order. This isn't the first time that that story has played out, however, and I doubt it will be the last.
> "Local market value" - you mean under market value, because they were pressured or outright forced to by their colonizers?
There were centuries of peaceful trade between Bengal and Europe before the invasion and exploitation you talk about happened. During this time Bengal/India could have made their own ships and gotten the same wealth from trade, but they didn't. East Indian companies grew a lot of their value during this period, and ultimately became strong enough that they could outright conquer their trade partners and therefore get the goods for free.
> Basically everywhere that Europeans colonized that already had wealth, commercial production, etc., saw all that wealth extracted from them
I never denied that colonization was bad for the people in those areas. I just denied that the trade that happened was bad for the region or that it was unfair. When the European powers conquered the area and became rulers it was bad, but that means the conquest was bad not that the trade was bad. Before the conquest Bengal had benefited from the trade with European powers.
They had an opportunity to explain why the colonised lands didn’t experience a “Great Enrichment”, but they chose to completely ignore most of history.
The "South" benefited massively from transfers of technology from the North. The North benefited with ....?