101–110 of 111 posts
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…
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.
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> 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…
I'm thinking more of Africa, where you had the colonies side by side. On average, the British colonies did better. And, probably because they were already hardened to disease, the natives tended to stick around and keep their land more.
They were side by side in the Americas, too. And while, yeah, disease was a problem for the indigenous people everywhere in the Americas, not all the colonial powers carried out genocidal displacement campaigns starting in the colonial period and lasting well beyond.
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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
A sizable chunk of users awake at this time of the day are descendants of the very same colonialists. What did you expect ?
Let’s face it. The British haven’t always treated others nicely.
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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 industr…
Nope, this is typical of the crap that you see quite frequently. We're not comparing 1600's wages to today, we're comparing them to wages in that era. Of course this was a pre-industrialized society, but it wasn't a society mired in poverty as most people imagine it to be.
The huge differences (factors of 10, even 100) arose only later, because of some pulling ahead.
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Why did you create a throwaway to post this?
Probably because it’s sure to get downvoted and flagged. Deviation from the hive mind is not appreciated here. As I write this my karma is 5497. Let’s see how it plummets.
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The pie grew and india was intentionally prevented from partaking in the pie by the british. Ignoring the mass famines and the humanitarian destruction caused by the british empire in india, the greatest damage inflicted on india was its lack of industrialization. Britain simply prevented india from industrializing until they were kicked out in 1947. Britain and the US really industrialized in the mid 1800s ( althoug…
How does this argument apply to European countries that had no colonies, such as Switzerland? Japan is a bit of an aberration. It was the only non-western country to industrialize early. Now, India might have done so also, had it somehow avoided industrialization yet maintained contact with industrializing countries. But, a counterpoint to this is that India basically didn't industrialize after independence either. O…
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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 industr…
Have you read the memoirs of Hiuen Tsang? India was exceptionally rich before the invasions of both the Moghuls and the British (and other Western powers). It is not to be taken lightly when the British regarded India as the "Jewel in the Crown"[1].
1: https://sites.google.com/site/imperialismindia/home/economic...
>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…
Because the British never spent their own hard earned money. It isn't fungible when you take someone's money from one hand and return back a small amount with the other hand without doing any measurable amount of work to have earned the money in the first place. How hard is that to understand?
As a counter, would you be okay with your Government taking a portion of your money as tax and using only a small portion of it for your benefit and keeping the rest to be distributed amongst the elected representatives? Obviously not. This has nothing to do with overtaxation because I am sure people wouldn't have resisted if that money was reused for common good. But it wasn't the case. The money was used to fill up British coffers to be used in fighting World Wars (for which by the way, Indian soldiers were forced to take part in with not much recognition).
By the way, the Empire taxed everything. They did not even spare Salt! That should put some perspective.
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…
> [Britain] tried to levy taxes on American tea, BTW there's an Indian connection there too (I assume you're talking about the Boston Tea Party). The cause of that episode was the British eliminating the tax on tea and at the same time giving the East India Company a tea monopoly in the North American colonies. When I was in school in Boston the official line was that the tea party demonstrators were smugglers upset…
I don't think that guerilla warfare is considered "unfair" by the US military today (can't speak for the 70s), the US still encourages it when it suits them, especially when encouraging regime change. Asymmetrical warfare requires guerilla tactics by the less conventionally powerful armies against more conventional armies.
The schools conveniently ignored the Native American assistance in fighting the British, and overstate the actual impact of the peasant rebellion. It was an organized army with discipline founded on the French that really cemented the colonists win over the British. George Washington really is one of the few Americans that was as amazing as his legend, if not more so.
Americans also really don't give enough credit to the French for their assistance. We sort of gloss over that point, however we did at least return the favor in WW1 and WW2 as well as taking over the mission in Vietnam. So I think I pretty much wrote all of this to agree that yes our narratives definitely evolve.
Have an awesome weekend.