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Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

The later history of The British East India Company left me disappointed and angry and what was destroyed and lost in India.

I think it was the below book.

Key passage from the review “Company officials engaged in a systematic orgy of asset-stripping Bengal, contributing to one of Bengal’s worst famines, killing millions. Rather than organise effective tax or famine relief, as was common among Indian rulers, the Company maintained its tax harvesting to sustain a high share price.”

Ultimately their pillaging and destruction damaged the company.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2020/01/14/book-rev...

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At the start of British colonization in India, India's GDP was ~30% of the world's GDP.

This had dropped to 2% by Independence of India in 1947...

I think pillaging is an understatement. It was a systematic transfer of wealth, probably like no other.

i think the industrial revolution happening in the intervening period might have had a little something to do with that

(and don't give me the "bengal was about to industrialize!!!" crap)

Industrial revolution was funded by the colonies, both in providing resources and the market for the finished goods. For instance, the British starved the local textile industry in Bengal (which had accounted to 30% of global textile market) by exporting the raw cotton back home and dumping the products in India.

The industrial revolution by in large funded itself. It was the result of the discovery of synergies between several technologies, such as transporting massive amounts of coal using water pumped out of coal mines using pumps powered by that coal. The more coal you dig, the more coal you can dig. Cheap coal in cities means you can have bigger factories in cities and more people living in cities to work in those factories, which made cheap goods that in turn supported even more people living in cities. Cycles such as this generated an immense amount of wealth and it would have taken over the world whether or not Europe was also doing colonialism stuff at the same time. If Europe had been limited to buying cotton at fair market values without colonizing people at the same time, that would not have stopped the industrial revolution. Colonialism was not a necessary prerequisite for industrialization.

But due to the free market, anybody trying to generate and sell cotton who was NOT using colonialism to make it cheap, was a loser. The industrial revolution hyped up the exploitation machinery to a new fever pitch. It became necessary, to compete.

Industrial revolution increased the demand for raw materials and thereby increased the profitability of colonialism. But that's not the same as colonialism being a prerequisite for industrialization. Industrialization also made chattel slavery in America much more profitable, but it would be an error to claim that chattel slavery in America was a prerequisite for the industrial revolution. The demand for resources that industrialization created would have been met one way or another. It exploited both colonialism and slavery, but didn't specifically rely on one or the other. Even if there had been no other choice but to pay all the cotton workers fairly, the demand of industrialization was strong enough that it would have supported that. The distribution of wealth would have changed at least somewhat, but industrialization certainly would have occurred anyway.

Right. So we'll relabel colonialism and slavery as 'inevitabilities' of industrialization. And be in the same place.

> For instance, the British starved the local textile industry in Bengal (which had accounted to 30% of global textile market) by exporting the raw cotton back home and dumping the products in India.

I mean, don't forget literally destroying the textile industry in India through a combination of targeted maiming and outright genocide. For centuries, Indian textiles had been the most sought-after across Europe and Asia, to the point where even today many modern words for textiles are Indian toponyms.

The textile portion of the British industrial revolution is pretty simple: they used slave labor to produce their raw materials (imported from the US) and destroyed their competition through violence and force, ensuring they could sell at virtually any price for nearly pure profit.

The bengal (Mughals) were at par with the British, technology wise. From Wikipedia

>> Modern views on the decline Since the 1970s historians have taken multiple approaches to the decline, with little consensus on which factor was dominant. The psychological interpretations emphasise depravity in high places, excessive luxury, and increasingly narrow views that left the rulers unprepared for an external challenge. A Marxist school (led by Irfan Habib and based at Aligarh Muslim University) emphasises excessive exploitation of the peasantry by the rich, which stripped away the will and the means to support the regime.[75] Karen Leonard has focused on the failure of the regime to work with Hindu bankers, whose financial support was increasingly needed; the bankers then helped the Maratha and the British.[76] In a religious interpretation, some scholars argue that the Hindu powers revolted against the rule of a Muslim dynasty.[77] Finally, other scholars argue that the very prosperity of the Empire inspired the provinces to achieve a high degree of independence, thus weakening the imperial court.[78]

Jeffrey G. Williamson has argued that the Indian economy went through deindustrialization in the latter half of the 18th century as an indirect outcome of the collapse of the Mughal Empire, with British rule later causing further deindustrialization.[79] According to Williamson, the decline of the Mughal Empire led to a decline in agricultural productivity, which drove up food prices, then nominal wages, and then textile prices, which led to India losing a share of the world textile market to Britain even before it had superior factory technology.[80] Indian textiles, however, still maintained a competitive advantage over British textiles up until the 19th century.[81]

I wonder how long it will take for your comment to attract a Teddy K zealot to the replies.

Well yes and no, that 30% was during a high-point of the Mughal empire and before the widespread development of industrial capitalism. Its certainly the case that Indian society may have turned out differently if not for the British, but maybe not for the better, it was a society descending into factionalism and civil strife as that empire collapsed, the British simply stepped in and took over primarily to secure their trade interests, because they couldn't trust the local kings and warlords to do so anymore. In doing so, and then later establishing a government, they introduced modern medicine, education, roads, the rail network, and other critical infrastructure, as well as industrial capitalism.

This is not to excuse the British, but perhaps India would've been better off without them, perhaps not, the alternative, if there wasn't a single government, could've been a patchwork of dysfunctional extractavist states, like what you see in Africa. It may have been possible for a large south asian society to organize itself in an egalitarian fashion, but unless some miracle happened they would've been overrun by foreign capitalists, who had far more power than any other class in history, because South Asia is incredibly labor and resource rich, and at the time the only parts of the world that had even developed industrial capitalism were in the "west", Europe and the US, not to mention the only place that avoided that fate, Japan--the latter being moreso an exception that proves the rule (and which, after all, turned fascist during WW2).

> British simply stepped in and took over primarily to secure their trade interests

That skips over the rape, murder and utter destruction quite tidily. The British were not there to help and I don’t think that could be a valid argument at any stretch.

Nobody trying to exploit others is "there to help", I only pointed out that the British were not particularly worse than any other colonial power, and it would've only been by some miracle that a superior alternative could've occurred. Morality is only a thin veneer over power, I was only asking if all the Indians today who work and communicate on these computers would rather be living in underdeveloped agrarian societies, like what you see in much of Africa.

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