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Comment by nsenifty | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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