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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

#31

Post by somebadguy »

dang wrote: post #23
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.

Yeah yeah whatever

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#32

Post by maxxxxx »

dang wrote: post #23
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.

Is the comment really that inflammatory? I think it's good to point that a lot of the "civilized" nations did a lot very bad things at the same time they were talking about freedom and humanity.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#33

Post by dragonwriter »

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

Technically two, one of which had non-contiguous parts which later had a falling out.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#34

Post by sachdevap »

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…

> India got partitioned into 3 countries ...

This is a huge simplification of the history of the Indian subcontinent. The British are the architects of the new boundary lines, but they are also the architects of what is now a unified country, India. Indian subcontinent as a unified entity prior to the arrival of the British as a major colonizing force in India is a lie. India was quite divided before that, which made it easy for them to play their little game of "divide and rule".

None of this absolves them of responsibility, but this over-simplified statement irks me, as it is a gross misrepresentation of the politics of the Indian subcontinent prior to the British.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#35

Post by dang »

maxxxxx wrote: post #32
dang wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is the comment really that inflammatory? I think it's good to point that a lot of the "civilized" nations did a lot very bad things at the same time they were talking about freedom and humanity.

The topic is inflammatory, which means flamebait guarantees flamewars. The comment was flamebaity in the ways I described. It's possible to write about these things in a less flamebaity way—that's just not the style people reach for by default on the internet. I agree with your second sentence btw.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#36

Post by pm90 »

justboxing wrote: post #19

I was in India last month after being away for over 2 decades. Visited Calcutta for the very first time. Our Driver and Tour Guide at the Taj took us around the city and told us about a lot of history about the City. At one point he said that over 1 million people live on the sidewalks (called footpaths) in Calcutta. I have seen abject poverty in India while growing up there, but not to this level. There are generati…

Calcutta was a tiny village when the British arrived.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#37

Post by iguy »

justboxing wrote: post #19

I was in India last month after being away for over 2 decades. Visited Calcutta for the very first time. Our Driver and Tour Guide at the Taj took us around the city and told us about a lot of history about the City. At one point he said that over 1 million people live on the sidewalks (called footpaths) in Calcutta. I have seen abject poverty in India while growing up there, but not to this level. There are generati…

This is not correct, Calcutta was some villages where it happened to be convenient for the east india company to set up shop: "The area where the city is now located was originally inhabited by the people of three villages: Kalikata, Sutanuti and Gobindapur." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Kolkata

Delhi on the other hand was a great city, many times over (and sacked, and re-built, by rules of many tongues).

But it's also important to know that when we say an ancient place was rich, we mean that the kings were rich & built big palaces etc. Peasants were poor everywhere in the pre-industrial world, with variations but not enormous ones, like the difference between 500 and 1000 USD/year.

When we say that a modern place is rich, we mean the average guy instead. And, sometimes, that their city is well-run and finds money to spend on public services etc. Which, in my understanding, Calcutta has not been in the last 50 years, compared to other Indian cities. However I would still bet that the median income has increased monotonically.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#38

Post by sandworm101 »

amvalo wrote: post #29

>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 - the…

Ya, sound far worse than it was. I'd phrase it more along the lines of saying "one third of collected taxes were re-spent in the country". A government buying services from local people, rather than importing it from abroad, is not a bad thing.

I think the other two thirds, the part not spent within India, was a far greater problem. That was the 'stolen' money, the money removed from the country.

Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India

#40

Post by iguy »

InGodsName wrote: post #14
pm90 wrote: post #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…

I never read any account from travellers (from Europe/China) describing India as poor before colonialism. So, i think this article does have some validity.

If you mean ordinary people, then everywhere was poor, so travel authors would not have seen a shocking contrast.

We actually have numbers on all this stuff, e.g. you can track a slow decline in day-labor wages, and IIRC (around Delhi maybe?) they decline slowly from about 1600 to 1800. There are comparable-sized rises and falls in other parts of the world, too. But all very low by modern standards.

Only with industrialisation did this change, and it lagged a bit -- the first gains typically allowed a population boom, without dragging down income as would previously have occurred.

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