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Comment by kamikazeturtles | Hacker News Reader

> Also, the largest theft in human history surely has to be the East India Company extracting something like 50 trillion from India over 200 years, right?

I never understood these sorts of statements. I feel historical events maybe after the Victorian age can claim to be theft, otherwise it's just empires and conquest.

Adjusted for inflation, wouldn't Alexander the Great's plundering of Persia, which at the time comprised 40% of the world's population, be the greatest theft in human history, using your logic?

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If we're going by theft as a percent of world GDP, then surely the biggest theft was when Zog stole Ug's best smashing rock

The measurement should be theft per capita or how many people did Sam Altman take from?

Divide total GDP by the population and turn it into one unit.

Ug's best smashing rock would be 1.

This was my favorite Far Side

That's nothin', my great^N ancestor was part of a horde that conquered the entire planet in a Grey-Goo apocalypse.

Sure, it's divided up amongst all the descendants now, but it was quite a heist.

when Zog stole Ug’s intellectual property rights in the starting of fire.

The world population was a lot lower back then, and India is quite large to begin with.

Yeah, you're right, it's not a fair comparison.

> I feel historical events maybe after the Victorian age can claim to be theft, otherwise it's just empires and conquest.

One criterion that might work is whether there's some greater power around that says it's theft, and is able/willing to enforce that in some manner.

So for example a successful conquest isn't theft, but a failed conquest is probably attempted theft (and vandalism of course).

There no way Persia comprised 40% of the world population at that time with India and China around.

>I feel historical events maybe after the Victorian age can claim to be theft, otherwise it's just empires and conquest.

"empires and conquest" is literally armed robbery.

> I feel historical events maybe after the Victorian age can claim to be theft, otherwise it's just empires and conquest.

It was always theft. Having been done in the past does not make them less theft. The reason East India Company is shown as example for such things is that it is the first human organization that did those on an industrial scale and genocidally.

https://yourstory.com/2014/08/bengal-famine-genocide

It was already starving Indians by forcing them to plant opium instead of food crops to sell to the Chinese to kill them for money (20 million/year estimated dead from opium) in the late 18th century. And when the Chinese finally tried to stop it, Opium wars happened. The justification shown for that war was 'Free trade'. The justifications still havent changed, neither the practices. This should tell you why East India Company is specifically evil, because it is the first large scale application of the evil you see today and it invented a lot of its methods.

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