This makes me appreciate the American Revolution all the more.
New research on the cost of colonization to India
71–80 of 111 posts
Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> India was quite divided before that, which made it easy for them to play their little game of "divide and rule". The fact that entire region was called Bharat escapes you I think. Just before British India was centrally organized and ruled by Mughals and Marathas so your argument does not stand. As far as "divide and rule" is concerned, due to the vastness of India regional leadership was always delegated. British…
Linking to my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18685130
Delegation is not the same as "divide and rule". There was active animosity amongst these provinces. The British played Bengal and Punjab against each other, for example. The Marathas did resist the British in their own strongholds, but they never centrally ruled an undivided India. It was a big empire nonetheless.
Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India
#73> Britain used the windfall from this fraudulent system to fuel the engines of imperial violence - funding the invasion of China in the 1840s and the suppression of the Indian Rebellion in 1857.
And to win World War I & II.
Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> India was quite divided before that, which made it easy for them to play their little game of "divide and rule". The fact that entire region was called Bharat escapes you I think. Just before British India was centrally organized and ruled by Mughals and Marathas so your argument does not stand. As far as "divide and rule" is concerned, due to the vastness of India regional leadership was always delegated. British…
> The fact that entire region was called Bharat...
I don't think that important fact inherently implies a unity that was never there. The(roughly defined) region called "Europe" has never been under the control of a unitary state or empire, even in the times of the Romans.
Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India
#75Shashi Tharoor an Indian politician has written a book about this as well. There is this narrative within India (among many hindus and advocated by hindu nationalist political parties such as the bjp) that the muslim empire of the Mughals harmed India and robbed it of some kind of growth. But people like Tharoor are trying to create this new narrative that the British were much more harmful for India than the 'muslim' rulers of the Mughal empire. here is a talk by Tharoor who has demanded that the British apologize for many of the events that took place during that period: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4
Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I know you are just doing your job, but what tezza did is called British humour.
Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India
#77From the article, "If India had been able to invest its own tax revenues and foreign exchange earnings in development - as Japan did - there's no telling how history might have turned out differently. "
I love this sentence but it implies a huge leap that I am not sure could have happened. Japan was a unitary state for a very long period -- millennia -- thanks in part to its island nature. Sure, there were civil wars, smaller, (non-sovereign!) regional powers and the like but for the majority of the past couple of millennia Japan was independent and unitary.
What would an independent India have been over the same period? The evidence is: fractious. Part of the reason the Persians and the British were able to build huge empires there was that each arrived when previous empires had become weak and where they could exploit differences between smaller states, taking control piecemeal. Note that Alexander the Great was unable to get a significant foothold in the subcontinent, in part because of the size of opposition he faced.
It's better to think of a large region like the subcontinent as being more akin to Europe, where various tiny states amalgamated to form medium-sized countries. Which is something that I think could have happened, and would have been much better for India than the British Raj. But the much tinier Japan is probably not an appropriate model.
Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India
#78Shashi Tharoor an Indian politician has written a book about this as well. There is this narrative within India (among many hindus and advocated by hindu nationalist political parties such as the bjp) that the muslim empire of the Mughals harmed India and robbed it of some kind of growth. But people like Tharoor are trying to create this new narrative that the British were much more harmful for India than the 'muslim…
I second this excellent book, "Inglorious Empire -- What the British did to India".
My American girlfriend was shocked when she picked this up and glanced through it -- she had had no idea. Her understanding, such as it was, was entirely from British TV.
Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where did the British get a lot of raw materials for their industrialization. Where did they dump a lot of their products ?
Doesn't this line of reasoning apply equally to the Swiss? They had no colonies, and are richer than Britain today. Probably were in 1952 as well.
Actually by 1952, probably not. Switzerland's economy was pretty much agricultural up to the second world war (remittence payments from the Vatican were a noticeable source of foreign income into the early 20th century!).
WWII offered a source of capital (people stashing their money into a neutral state, and many never asking for it back) and some industrialization, but the Switzerland we think of today is really a product of the late 50s/1960s.
Re: New research on the cost of colonization to India
#80This 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 f…
re: (1) I don't know why people try to use these crazy discount factors on such long time horizons. I feel like it should be pretty easy. The currency of the time was in precious metals. So, we can just revalue the gold and silver in kilos from 1700 in dollars for 2018.
You're right there's quite good data on European interest rates and COG data (i.e. inflation proxies) for this period.
Still, this enormous number is probably in the ballpark.