Comment by profsummergig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by profsummergig | Hacker News Reader

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While on the subject of alternative colonialism:

This is very controversial among Indians, but there are many among Indians who wish the British never left. The major builder of modern Delhi was a person named Sobha Singh. His son, Khushwant Singh, was a major writer/journalist in post-Independence India. The son has written a book about how when the British were in control, his father would sometimes gift fruit baskets to the British managers/bureaucrats (of the Delhi-building project), and they would accept the gifts, but they never asked for bribes (or fruit baskets). After the British left, and Indians (government bureaucrats/civil servants) took over the project, his father had to always pay them bribes to get movement on projects.

India had airplane factories (multiple) before and during WW2. They were all shut down after Nehru's nationalization of industries project. It took almost another hundred years until India made planes again (I use the word "made" loosely... they mostly assemble...).

Places like Hispaniola (Haiti/DR), Philippines, Cuba would be far, far ahead of where they are today if a benevolent USA still had them in her territories (of course, the "benevolent" is important here, it shouldn't be a vindictive, extractive power).

A correction: I meant to write that India had "private" companies making planes before and during WW2. They were nationalized by Nehru into a government owned plane manufacturing entity. This entity is currently struggling to build a plane, Tejas, that was conceived of in 1983. The plane is not yet in volume production, and has one of the highest rates of crashes of any production plane in the world.

Reminds me how (iirc) Machiavelli observed that instability and dysfunction from class conflict and internal factionalism in Italian city-states often led to the people welcoming external authoritarian rule that brought stability.

Why would a colonialist power ever be benevolent towards its colonies?

After recognition of common humanity?

The claims above are just classic colonial apologia. That "fruit basket" anecdote just shows everythign wrong with that system. "Voluntarily" gifting your colonial overlord isn't out of love, it's systemic extortion. Just like how Babylonian peasants offered tribute to Achaemenid Persian kings to not incur their wrath, which is way worse than a transactional bribe. And frankly, if a post-independence Indian bureaucrat suddenly stopped receiving the exact same unquestioning tribute their British predecessor got, it makes total sense they'd feel insulted and demand a payout, since the British literally institutionalized that messed-up power dynamic. On a macro level, while a British manager might not have asked for a fruit basket, the empire systematically drained an estimated 45 trillion dollars from India through extractive and exploitative mercantilist policies, policies that turned droughts into horrific mass famines (like the 1943 Bengal Famine that killed 3 million people), and left the country in 1947 with crushing extreme poverty, an almost single digit literacy rate, and a life expectancy of little more than thirty years. And how many famines did India have post-independence? ZERO. Yeah, that's how incompetent the 'benevolent' British overlords were. So take your pick. They were either mighty incompetent, or just not really that ‘benevolent’ to begin with. Also, since we are on the topic of American imperialism, it is ironic that we are even justifying British imperialism in India considering one of the reasons behind the Americans revolting against the British was how the British Mercantilist policies attempted to stunt American Industrial capacity, something which India had to unfortunately continue to bear the burden of given they were under their thumb for another 150 years more. Then there's the historical inaccuracy about Nehru shutting down airplane factories. Hindustan Aircraft Limited was founded by an Indian industrialist, and post-independence India actually expanded it to build the Marut, Asia's first indigenous jet fighter. Looking at India's recovery today, it's a massive auto-manufacturing export hub, building world-class infrastructure, and literally built a space program (ISRO) from scratch that reached Mars and the lunar south pole at a fraction of Western costs. Finally, sneering at modern manufacturing as "mostly assembling" just proves a total ignorance of basic economics. If you actually apply David Ricardo’s comparative advantage and Adam Smith’s division of labor, you'd know that trying to manufacture every single microchip, landing gear, and rivet from scratch is economically ruinous autarky. Thanks to economies of scale, everyone "mostly assembles", even aviation giants like Boeing and Airbus rely entirely on global supply chains for parts because that's how modern manufacturing actually works in the real world. By your logic, we should all be looking up to the North Korean economy considering how autarkic and ‘self-sufficient’ in terms of manufacturing heavy machinery it really is!

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