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I know the point you are trying to make but India wouldn't have been better off economically under British Empire. British decimated the Indian economy http://

I know the point you are trying to make but India wouldn't have been better off economically under British Empire. British decimated the Indian economy http://www.thehindu.com/2005/07/10/stories/2005071002301000.htm http://www.thehindu.com/2005/07/10/stories/2005071002301000.... As the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6 per cent in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3 per cent at that time, to as low as 3.8 per cent in 1952. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th Century, "the brightest jewel in the British Crown" was the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income

Chathamization 10y ago
> India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6 per cent in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3 per cent at that time, to as low as 3.8 per cent in 1952. Not sure how useful this statistic is - it's including the collapse of the Mughal Empire in the early 1700's. British company rule is usually dated around the mid-1700's, with the British Raj starting in the mid-1800's. We're also looking at percentage of the global economy, so it's not clear how much of this is a decline in the Indian economy and how much is it not growing as fast as other countries.
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- bluishgreen 10y ago
  Think of it like this: India is a company and you are the CEO. The market is disrupted and you sat on your ass - will the stock holders be happy with you because the stock price went down, but hey - you were still doing the same thing for 100 years with no change, so congrats? A State is the same as a company, except worse - they have an army and a monopoly on violence. After a war, when a king takes over, they tried to integrate with the new people, marry into them and in this way eventually begin to rule them. That began to change when people’s skin color was drastically different. The term Colonists was invented to convey how race got into the mix. The British were never a Raj (kings), they never ruled over India in the traditional sense of the word. They were colonists - they colonized and decimated the Indian economy. Forget the economy, they decimated the population:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India#Scholarly_opinions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India#Scholarly_opin...
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gh-lfneu28 10y ago
Except that Angus Maddison's estimates are a wild speculation based on hand-waved assumptions and 'extrapolated' data.
ddebernardy 10y ago
That's comparing apples to oranges though. China was also huge at the time, and no Europeans were there to screw it over. Yet, they were irrelevant by the turn of the 20th century. (If you really want something to point fingers at, try the habits that stem from the cultural and religious landscapes. You can't erase millennia worth of those overnight.)
- boundlessdreamz 10y ago
  Europeans didn't screw over China? Come on - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars Europeans screwed over every single country they could.

Chathamization 10y ago

> India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6 per cent in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3 per cent at that time, to as low as 3.8 per cent in 1952. Not sure how useful this statistic is - it's including the collapse of the Mughal Empire in the early 1700's. British company rule is usually dated around the mid-1700's, with the British Raj starting in the mid-1800's. We're also looking at percentage of the global economy, so it's not clear how much of this is a decline in the Indian economy and how much is it not growing as fast as other countries.

deleted 10y ago
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bluishgreen 10y ago
Think of it like this: India is a company and you are the CEO. The market is disrupted and you sat on your ass - will the stock holders be happy with you because the stock price went down, but hey - you were still doing the same thing for 100 years with no change, so congrats? A State is the same as a company, except worse - they have an army and a monopoly on violence. After a war, when a king takes over, they tried to integrate with the new people, marry into them and in this way eventually begin to rule them. That began to change when people’s skin color was drastically different. The term Colonists was invented to convey how race got into the mix. The British were never a Raj (kings), they never ruled over India in the traditional sense of the word. They were colonists - they colonized and decimated the Indian economy. Forget the economy, they decimated the population:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India#Scholarly_opinions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India#Scholarly_opin...

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gh-lfneu28 10y ago

Except that Angus Maddison's estimates are a wild speculation based on hand-waved assumptions and 'extrapolated' data.

ddebernardy 10y ago

That's comparing apples to oranges though. China was also huge at the time, and no Europeans were there to screw it over. Yet, they were irrelevant by the turn of the 20th century. (If you really want something to point fingers at, try the habits that stem from the cultural and religious landscapes. You can't erase millennia worth of those overnight.)

boundlessdreamz 10y ago
Europeans didn't screw over China? Come on - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars Europeans screwed over every single country they could.