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New research on the cost of colonization to India

aljazeera.com

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Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#3
My government uses my taxes to buy goods and services in the local market. Is that defrauding or just the nature of providing government? This article is on somewhat loose economic grounds, I fear. People paid taxes, albeit to the coloniser, some people could sell their goods at market prices. Things we still find pretty reasonable. On top of that compounding at 5% for 250 yrs is not a good way to create current dollars. That's a compound factor of 200k. Five dollars of taxes in the early periods equals one million dollars in their narrative.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#6
post #3

My government uses my taxes to buy goods and services in the local market. Is that defrauding or just the nature of providing government? This article is on somewhat loose economic grounds, I fear. People paid taxes, albeit to the coloniser, some people could sell their goods at market prices. Things we still find pretty reasonable. On top of that compounding at 5% for 250 yrs is not a good way to create current doll…

When the government buys things with tax money, the things are supposed to be used for the benefit of people who paid the taxes. It doesn't seem like the Company even pretended that this was the case.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#7
Thank goodness for this research. I’ve seen many commenters in this forum argue that colonialism was somehow good for India, this seems to comprehensively refute that ridiculous notion.

I used to wonder what good it did by musing over past losses this way. As someone born and raised in India, I felt very acutely the feeling of loss, not just in economy but perhaps the well being and scientific progress that just didn’t happen because of this. I’m still not sure how to deal with it, but research such as this at least helps in ensuring that the truth is spelt out and hopefully something that we learn from and not repeat in the future.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#8
To add to that: India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6% in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3% at that time, to as low as 3.8% in 1952.[1]

And, India got partitioned into 3 countries, all of which have spend insane amounts of resources fighting each other when that same could have been spent on economic development and other hostile neighbors of the unified India would have been smaller in size to be a threat.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_economy_of_the...

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#9
post #3

My government uses my taxes to buy goods and services in the local market. Is that defrauding or just the nature of providing government? This article is on somewhat loose economic grounds, I fear. People paid taxes, albeit to the coloniser, some people could sell their goods at market prices. Things we still find pretty reasonable. On top of that compounding at 5% for 250 yrs is not a good way to create current doll…

I don't understand this comment.

If tax money of the tax payers of India is used to buy good/services for the tax payers of Britain. How is it not defrauding?

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