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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

#21

Post by dang »

pm90 wrote: post #18
dang wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that happens fairly often without upvote manipulation, and as far as I can tell this post wasn't affected by such manipulation.

It seems that this article has been flagged. Dang, I have noticed this quite frequently now: criticisms of Facebook and articles critical of colonialism get flagged off of the front page. As a regular member of this community, this really undermines my trust in the objectivity of this forum

Anti-Facebook stories certainly haven't mostly been flagged, except insofar as some users are tired of seeing so many, which would be a "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" phenomenon.

Stories about colonialism sometimes get flagged, presumably because they give rise to ideological and (worse) racial and national flamewar. But there have been many on Hacker News' front page over the years, as well.

The thing to watch out for with such perceptions, besides sample bias, is that we're all more likely to notice what we dislike than what we agree with. If a story I like gets flagged, that registers far more strongly than a story I like not getting flagged. So even a perfectly even-handed forum will seem unfair and biased in any area you feel strongly about. Not that HN is a perfectly even-handed forum—but what's going on is a lot more stochastic than these perceptions seem.

Edit: having looked at the story, I think probably what tipped the balance for flags over upvotes was the obviously baity title. Threads are sensitive to initial conditions, and a title like that guarantees a bad thread, regardless of how justified it might be. I've edited the title and turned off the flags.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#23

Post by dang »

tezza wrote: post #17

Hang on a minute... is this guy saying the country that * had the largest supply of slaves[1], * tried to levy taxes on American tea, * broke China and forced them to buy their own Opium * invented concentration camps to defeat the Dutch Boers[2] * used Gibraltar as a control point for the entire Mediterranean * erased most Tasmanian Aboriginals [3] did something dodgy in India ?? [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/li…

Please do not take HN threads into ideological and national flamewar. The tell-tale signs of this being a bad comment for HN are: (a) the snark, and (b) the list of talking points. Combined with the flammatory topic, it amounts to vandalism, so please don't.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#26

Post by sgift »

yumraj wrote: post #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 t…

> 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.

Which they weren't forced too. That's not a "cost" of colonization but a cost of not choosing another path.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#27

Post by dragonwriter »

dhbradshaw wrote: post #24

The interesting thing is that as far as colonists go, I think the Brits were the best there were. Better be colonized by them than by the Portuguese, French, Spanish, etc in terms of your subsequent national success.

> The interesting thing is that as far as colonists go, I think the Brits were the best there were. Better be colonized by them than by the Portuguese, French, Spanish, etc in terms of your subsequent national success.

Outside of India and a couple other examples, though, the “subsequent national success” is of the ex-British colonists, not the colonized people, who are destroyed or marginalized inside what was once their land.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#28

Post by throwayasdf23 »

This is mostly nonsense.

1) The 5% return that produced the $45T figure is significantly higher than the expected return on capital for the vast majority of that period(which includes risk and is not comparable to modern returns). Furthermore, there would be no place to put that money to try to extract that return. The notion that the 18th century even had a safe positive return on capital for large periods of time for proto-investors is dubious to say the least.

2) The timeline doesn't fit for claiming that colonial India dramatically benefited the imperial center or periphery. The UK was industrializing and ahead of the rest of Europe before revenues from India are supposed to have made a difference yet fell behind countries like Germany(which lacked any colonies until the late 19th century) even as revenues from India were supposedly diverted. The periphery is no better, Canada and Australia fell behind the US even with the supposed surplus from India.

3) I'm skeptical that diverted taxes from a mostly agricultural society like India could have produced the bonanza suggested in this article. Existing Per capita taxes would have been onerous enough and not much more could have been meaningfully extracted from the peasantry. A pre-modern society has enough problems with basic economic management and political stability; sustaining a massive bureaucracy necessary to collect taxes without rents diverted to local elites doesn't make a lot of sense.

4) As an addendum to (3) the early East India Company lacked the ability to even administer the country without the cooperation of elites(which required the dispersal of rents). The later imperial bureaucracy necessary to administer India was by all accounts quite expensive. There just isn't the gigantic return form skimming off taxes that is suggested in the article.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#29

Post by amvalo »

>Here's how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third) to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, "buying" from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.

> It was a scam - theft on a grand scale. Yet most Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat.

This sounds needlessly circuitous. Money is fungible, so how is this different from saying the British overtaxing them?

The actual book this article refers to doesn't seem to push such a weird argument (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/dispossession-deprivation-and-...).

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#30

Post by tareqak »

sgift wrote: post #26
yumraj wrote: post #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 t…

> 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. Which they weren't forced too. That's not a "cost" of colonization but a cost of not choosing another path.

They weren't forced to partition, but they were led down that path by the British in an attempt to divide them as they left. The thinking was that the divided former colonies would drive themselves into such a state such that they would invite their colonial masters back to rule over them.

There was definitely religious violence in South Asia before colonization, but the scale and depth definitely increased during and after.

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