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Comment by hnbad | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for pointing this out. Even the most exaggerated claims about the "death toll of communism" tend to fall short of estimates of the total death toll of British rule of its colonies (the Holodomor pales in comparison to the preventable famines in India alone) and the British East India Company played no small part in this.

We really should have a more critical lense of colonialism nowadays and abandon the badly aging romanticization of it.

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Famines were common and cyclical in India prior to British colonization as well. There are certain ones you can pin on the British, like in 1943, but it would be a feat to get close to the deaths from communism.

And even then you’re comparing an empire that was quite openly exploiting who they viewed as lesser people, versus governments who devastated their own populations through good intentions.

(I also find it funny to see the top response criticizing the obviously Indian author for failing to talk about something other than war and famine. Folks love their poverty porn, huh?)

They just find it distasteful. It’s like reading a productivity article about the best tips to be a more effective organizer by learning from the mistakes of Operation Searchlight in failing to put down the East Pakistani insurgency.

There were also famines in the 1870s-1890s where the extent of the death toll was mostly determined by British administration and imposition of laissez-faire capitalism and Malthusian ideology.

> And even then you’re comparing an empire that was quite openly exploiting who they viewed as lesser people, versus governments who devastated their own populations through good intentions.

Funny. That's exactly how most people who keep talking about the Holodomor say the Soviet Union viewed the Kulaks.

> I also find it funny to see the top response criticizing the obviously Indian author for failing to talk about something other than war and famine.

He's not talking about "something other than war and famine", he's romanticizing a company that literally killed and oppressed millions of people in the history of his own country. He can simply not do that, without having to only talk about victimhood. Black Americans can talk about other things than how cotton plantations were a great business model actually without talking about how slavery was bad. It's just very odd to focus so much on the supposed positives of an overall extremely bad thing. This is very much a "I just want the trains to run on time" kind of situation.

> bad. It's just very odd to focus so much on the supposed positives of an overall extremely bad thing. This is very much a "I just want the trains to run on time" kind of situation.

I for one want to know how the East India Company managed to colonize a vastly more populous and historically wealthier civilization. There’s certainly lessons in there. After all, you can’t undo those things, but you can make the trains run on time. And the lives of Indians in the present would be better if the trains ran on time.

The article does provide interesting, educational details, but it also engages in a lot of gratuitous cheerleading of the BEIC and makes comparisons to modern day startups. Wonks celebrating imperialism for business lessons. It’s ghoulish and absurdly tasteless. You can expect something like that from say the War Nerd, but the style and framing of this article is just wildly inappropriate.

> Wonks celebrating imperialism for business lessons

First, the article does plenty of throat clearing about those issues.

Second, empires are impressive. Can the French or British find things to admire about the Romans?

> Can the French or British find things to admire about the Romans?

The statute of limitations have passed on those crimes since they took place in Antiquity.

> First, the article does plenty of throat clearing about those issues.

Please, he's practically drooling:

> While not quite Google cafeteria, the lunches and dinners served were exquisite! Free breakfasts in London, and on-site cooks (English, Portuguese and Indian) in factories, with plenty of alcohol to go around.

> If that’s not enough, if you were a senior officer you got a pretty great stipend to spend on entertaining others.

> Also, they had an incredibly sexy headquarter to work in (marble bas-reliefs, pipe organ of a tiger devouring a European and jewel-encrusted gold throne of the Sultan of Mysore Tipu). Even the warehouses were elegant and stylish in the City.

To satisfy Godwin's law: Nazi concentration camps had amenities like swimming pools for the guards. I'm sure plenty of thought went into how to make the job comfortable given its gruesome reality. That doesn't mean we should be writing salivating opeds about management lessons to take away from that.

> The statute of limitations have passed on those crimes since they took place in Antiquity.

Europeans got over it even way back in antiquity. The Franks adopted the Roman language, religion (by then Christianity), and civil law and institutions. They didn’t seek to distance themselves from Roman empirical history.

Then perhaps it is different in that South Asian nations don’t seem themselves as successors to Britain, whereas many peoples the Romans conquered claimed their imperial mantle as legitimacy.

That’s a choice.

Fwiw I wrote right upfront that it's of course terrible. But the assumption was that now that we've acknowledged that we can also look at other aspects. I get the revulsion though, sorry!

It’s interesting history and good analysis but the whole framing just seems ill-conceived. “Business operational lessons from the great bloodthirsty marauders of history” works as a parody or when you’re intentionally edgy (as with War Nerd), here it’s reads as tone-deaf.

To be abundantly clear, the trains did not run on time: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/stop-sayi...

There's a difference between looking at the BEIC to figure out how it managed to exist this long and looking at it to find "some things to learn" from it and using it as a model for building a successful business.

> Famines were common and cyclical in India prior to British colonization as well.

The very same can be said about the Russian empire/the USSR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia...

> And even then you’re comparing an empire that was quite openly exploiting who they viewed as lesser people, versus governments who devastated their own populations through good intentions.

Sorry, which one is the UK and which one is the USSR here?

If someone starts pinning the (continued) deaths due to the disturbance of social customs and divide-and-rule by the British (Also account for the partition). It may far surpass it

To anyone who thinks this is obvious hyperbole: please look into the causes of the Rwandan genocide. Specifically the ahistorical division of the local population into two competing tribes by the Belgian colonial government. Divide-and-rule is a long standing tradition because it prevents the colonized from unifying and rising up against the colonizers by giving one group preferential treatment over the others.

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