Marc Andreessen Pro-Colonialism Tweet Riles India Tech World

The first industrial revolution in the UK began in the mid 18th century. The 1820s is towards the end of the first industrial revolution - you are thinking of the second industrial revolution.

Do you think that Britain managed to dominate india in the 18th century despite having - supposedly - no advantages whatsoever? In fact the very reason Britain was able to do this was because it had already leapt ahead.

Now, once again, nobody denies that Britain did many bad things to India. I merely take issue with (probable hindu nationalist's) bizarre a-historical notions that India was a giant of the world in the 18th century and that if only Evil Britain hadn't somehow cheated its way into colonising it then it would naturally have kept pace with developments in Europe, and that therefore the entire developmental disparity between them can be 100% blamed on Britain.

That's total nonsense. My comment was intended to point out that while yes of course Britain's colonisation of India wasn't necessarily "a good thing" it isn't to say that if it hadn't happened India would have been filled with steam engines and trains in 1850.

You can't have a counterfactual to say that India would have been a shangri la without Britain's colonisation. It may have been worse or better than now, we will never know, but it would certainly not have "kept up" with the revolutions sweeping Europe and it is deeply disingenuous to claim that.

Right around 1830 was when the American Southern cotton plantation system took off, and more or less completely displaced Indian cotton on the world market[1] because it was cheap, cotton gins were efficient, and it was a whole lot closer to ship it from Mobile or Charleston to Birmingham, than to go all the way down around the Cape and back.

Opium became a huge export for India because it was the only thing other than bullion the Brits (and Americans, and Dutch, and Portuguese) could hit on to trade profitably in the China market. Then, later, that cash crop was undercut by cheaper product produced in Turkey, and by Chinese domestic production.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin#Effects_in_the_Unit...

There is about 70 years from the start of company rule to the 1830's. If you're not allowed to manufacture textiles in that time period, what exactly do you think would happen? You'd maintain a comparative advantage?

On opium: In India, its cultivation, as well as the manufacture and traffic to China, were subject to the British East India Company (BEIC), as a strict monopoly of the British government.[7]

Opium, like most industries, only benefited the British. So it would be more accurate for you to say the British used the Indians to start exporting opium.

So lets recap. People that mostly export textiles suddenly finds themselves 1) unable to make their own textiles, 2) forced to plant cotton and other crops for sole benefit of the British. So you have a whole civilization barred from selling finished goods. Gee wonder what happens to them.

[1] Taxation of salt has occurred in India since the earliest times. However, this tax was greatly increased when the British East India Company began to establish its rule over provinces in India. In 1835, special taxes were imposed on Indian salt to facilitate its import. This paid huge dividends for the traders of the British East India Company. When the Crown took over the administration of India from the Company in 1858, the taxes were not replaced.

The stringent salt taxes imposed by the British were vehemently condemned by the Indian public. In 1885, at the first session of the Indian National Congress in Bombay, a prominent Congress Leader S.A.Swaminatha Iyer raised the issue of the salt tax.[1] There were further protests throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries culminating in Mahatma Gandhi's Salt Satyagraha in 1930. This sathyagraha was followed by other sathyagrahas in other parts of the country.

After the arrest of Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu lead the sathyagrahis to Dharasana Salt works in Gujarat and was arrested by the police. C. Rajagopalachari broke the Salt Laws at Vedaranyam, in Madras Province in the same year. Thousands courted arrest and were imprisoned in large numbers. The administration eventually relented and invited Mahatma Gandhi to England to attend the Second Round Table Conference. Gandhi's Dandi March got wide news coverage and proved to be a turning point in the history of India's independence movement.

The salt tax, however, continued to remain in effect and was repealed only when Jawaharlal Nehru became the Prime Minister of the Interim Government in 1946.

Once again, I'm not claiming that British colonialism was great for India or that Britain didn't subjugate India or that British capitalists didn't treat India as a captured market or any other number of doubtless terribly evil things that I am sure you can tell me about all day.

I'm merely taking issue with the curious notion that India would have inevitably kept up with the West despite that none of the features that were giving the West and Britain in particular such advantages were to be found in India, which then supports the idea that it is utterly asinine to claim that if only it wasn't for Britain India would be a superpower with 25% of world trade.

India had fallen behind long before Britain colonised it, and there's no reason at all therefore to believe that it being behind now can be 100% blamed on Britain.

If you are really claiming that India was on the verge of the industrial revolution and Britain thwarted it, then I don't think I have the time to argue with you, because your belief flies in the face of near any widely accepted understanding of history.

Those are not my words -- I am responding to those words.