11 ms·

It is actually amazing how little British folks today know about their own historical misdeeds, they may accept the issues towards USA and other countries but t

It is actually amazing how little British folks today know about their own historical misdeeds, they may accept the issues towards USA and other countries but tend to downplay atrocities magnitudes higher in India and other countries India is important because it was the crown jewel of the British empire and was completely destroyed of its soul by the colonialists with very clever mixture of politics, military and other methods

chimeracoder 9y ago
> It is actually amazing how little British folks today know about their own historical misdeeds, they may accept the issues towards USA and other countries but tend to downplay atrocities magnitudes higher in India and other countries To add to this, it's not just the British. The Portuguese, French, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish (among others) colonized parts of India long before the British did, and the Portuguese and French also kept their colonies in India much longer. When people talk about India's independence in 1947, that's just referring to the independence of British India. The French stayed until 1962, and the Portuguese held their colonies until 1975. Amusingly, most Portuguese and French people I've talked to under the age of forty[0] or so are genuinely shocked to learn this. On the other hand, most British people are apparently proud of their colonial plundering[1], so I guess everyone has a long way to go still. (P.S. If you're thinking of responding to this with a comment about how the British "improved" India by industrializing it, or all the "benefits" India got from being plundered for 450 years, please save us all the trouble and don't. These are typical revisionist talking points that are easily debunked as ahistorical with some basic research, and they're put forth to distract from the sheer volume of wealth that was stolen, the amount of infrastructure that was destroyed by colonial regimes, the genocides and other war crimes that were committed by the colonizing countries, and so on. For most of recorded history, India (Bengal in particular) was the world's largest economy - over 25% of the world's GDP[2] - and every discussion that attempts to rationalize that loss after colonization without recognizing the value that was destroyed, stolen, or outright murdered ultimately into revisionist white supremacist history, which is not what HN is for.) I know I'll get eventually downvoted for this, because talking about the brutality and legacy of European colonialism is always unpopular on HN for obvious reasons, but it's important enough that it needs to be said. [0] ie, young enough that this wasn't in their lifetimes [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-people-are-proud-of-colonialism-and-the-british-empire-poll-finds-a6821206.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-people... [2] https://www.coursera.org/learn/passport-to-india/lecture/uYUIK/when-india-was-the-richest-country-on-earth https://www.coursera.org/learn/passport-to-india/lecture/uYU...
- celticninja 9y ago
  Imagine invading a country to essentially control it's natural resources. Thanks goodness we have moved on from that sort of behaviour and now we need some kind of moral reason (e.g war on terror) to do this to other countries (e.g. Iraq).
  - jhgb 9y ago
    Have we really? Or did we simply move to more insidious policies like forcing "free trade treaties" and such?
- itissid 9y ago
  When things like the bengal famine happen because of just diverting India's supply chain to the WWII how the F* do you put up with something like that. If you haven't seen it already read the wikipedia entry[1] and pause and think for a moment, they denied food shipments for almost 2 full years in a famine. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
  - nonamechicken 9y ago
    It's not just one famine. There have been many. It's estimated that anywhere from 10 to 40 million died in these alone. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-35-million-deaths-britain-shashi-tharoor-british-empire-a7627041.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-35-millio...
- blackrock 9y ago
  > If you're thinking of responding to this with a comment about how the British "improved" India by industrializing it, or all the "benefits" India got from being plundered for 450 years I once overheard my white coworker say, that the British did India a huge favor, by bringing them English. It was in his belief that back then, the Indians were just killing each other for fun. So the British did them a huge favor by colonizing them. And because of that, today, India is a major software player for outsourcing, all thanks to the British for colonizing them, and bringing them English. I sat there thinking to myself, this is unbelievable. I didn't want to talk politics in a business setting, so I ignored it. The British destroyed a civilization. Enslaved a generation. And enriched themselves in the process. But all that is swept under the rug, because they brought English to their colonies.
baursak 9y ago
Crimes of Britain is pretty informative Twitter account on this topic. Here's a sample of a lot more recent British history: https://twitter.com/crimesofbrits/status/905035282046742528 https://twitter.com/crimesofbrits/status/905035282046742528
- rmdundon 9y ago
  Interesting. However, when anything, such as that video, mentions "zionism", that automatically triggers my anti-Semite radar.
  - baursak 9y ago
    I also used to think that anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism, until I learned more about it. There are plenty of anti-Zionist Jews, both inside and outside Israel. This short clip explains the difference pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7dJLP3L0Xw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7dJLP3L0Xw
    - chimeracoder 9y ago
      > There are plenty of anti-Zionist Jews, both inside and outside Israel Yes, Zionism was originally a minority nationalist movement within the Orthodox and Conservative Jewish communities. Only more recently did they become larger, empowered in part for political reasons by other political powers. There are still large sects of Orthodox Judaism that believe that the existence of Israel actually prevents the Messiah from coming, because the true Israeli state will be founded by the Messiah. In short: it's complicated. Not all Jews are Xionists, and not a Zionists are Jewish (anti-Semitic white nationalists are actually big supporters of Israel for reasons that aren't too surprising if you think about their motivations and the implications). And the reverse is true in both directions for people who oppose Zionism or the current Israeli state.
    - smogcutter 9y ago
      Speaking as an anti-zionist Jew, I'm generally extremely suspicious of gentiles who throw the word "zionist" around. Within the Jewish population there's a broad spectrum of opinion between AIPAC and Jewish Voice for Peace. In the mouths of the goyim, though, "zionists" doesn't often mean "supporters of Israeli nationalism". It means "the cabal of hebrews who manipulate world affairs to their own profit." Even though it's not the dictionary definition, that context is inextricable and often deliberate. For myself, I'm perfectly comfortable with a non-Jew calling themselves anti-Israel. That's just politics. But anti-zionist? Now I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.
apsec112 9y ago
AFAICT, the British Empire gets much more criticism for its various evils than other historical empires do. Very few people in the West, for example, even know about the ethnic cleansing of the Greeks under the Ottoman Empire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide), and that was less than a century ago. Probably the worst European colonialists were the Belgians, of all people, under King Leopold II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...). And I've virtually never heard anyone talk about all the wars and conquests in India before the British came. The Mughal Empire was not conquered with sunshine and rainbows, etc.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  The Dutch VOC is right up there.
- gizmodo59 9y ago
  I'm not sure why you are bringing this point. OP is not saying British are worse than Ottoman or other empires.(Two Wrongs Make A Right Fallacy)
  - apsec112 9y ago
    The claim seemed to be that historical British crimes were disproportionately ignored, compared to historical crimes committed by other countries. I am arguing against this by pointing to other crimes that (I'm guessing) most Westerners don't even know about.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - pgeorgi 9y ago
      The Mughal empire mistreating Indians has a slightly different relevance to Westerners than some Western empire doing the same. Not knowing about Mughal is ignorance, while not learning about the bad sides of our own history is (often: culturally imposed) revisionism.
travmatt 9y ago
I've heard some Brits complain about American misdeeds throughout the Middle East without a hint hypocrisy crossing their face.
- rhaps0dy 9y ago
  Right, but that's happening _now_ so we (well, the people who are doing it) have the power to prevent it.
- Balero 9y ago
  These are individual people. If the British government was to complain, then that could be considered hypocritical. But an individual person can't be held to account for actions taken, by others and (quite probably) before they were born.
  - srean 9y ago
    What if they are still benefiting from those historical acts ?
    - TallGuyShort 9y ago
      Name a country where you can live without unknowingly benefiting from some atrocity in the past.
      - gertef 9y ago
        Not the point. Whoever you are, if you have ill-gotten gains (more than average at least), even as a gift, you have a moral obligation to use them to counter the ill.
- GauntletWizard 9y ago
  There's a scene in the first episode of Sherlock where it's pointed out that Dr. Watson is a "British doctor injured in the war in Afghanistan" - I laughed. Apparently I was the only one in my circle of friends who got that that was the original character's biography, written in 1887!
neximo64 9y ago
The most interesting thing, these misdeeds are judged with the very eyes of morality created by the British themselves.
sol_remmy 9y ago
Misdeeds of the British aristocracy. Leave my grandparents out of this. IF you ever meet a Englishman from nobility, know that he is culpable to blame for all of this.
- horsecaptin 9y ago
  Common folk everywhere have more in common with each other than they have with people in power. The problem is that they are constantly fooled into believing otherwise. This is why our grandparents shouldn't be left out of this. All too often children are taught blind devotion to one's country, when in reality this means blind devotion to the leaders. Things have gotten better though. We have elections and the internet. We can more openly sympathize and empathize and learn and hopefully this will make us all better together.
  - sol_remmy 9y ago
    Huh so my great-grandparents that were farming in the middle of the country side are to blame for this? They didn't even receive newspapers. The only way they could have protested the government back then was refusing to pay taxes. And that would have gotten them killed.
    - gertef 9y ago
      "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edmundburk377528.html https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edmundburk377528...
- quotemstr 9y ago
  > IF you ever meet a Englishman from nobility, know that he is culpable to blame for all of this. So you believe in inherited guilt? I reject that idea. None of us is responsible for the actions of our ancestors.
weerd 9y ago
There's a quote I really enjoy from a German historian that nicely describes this: "There are un-tragic peoples, whom history pearls off of like water from a well-polished boot." - Rolf Peter Sieferle
pmyteh 9y ago
It's covered in school history classes, sufficiently anti-colonially for a certain slice of conservative talking heads to decry Britain 'talking down its glorious past'. My class covered the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in some depth at age 15; a lovely example of late Empire brutality where one of our army officers ordered machine guns turned on a non-violent crowd who were demonstrating in breach of government order. So it's not covered in any depth, but the empire certainly isn't celebrated uncritically in school or in other official contexts.
- newen 9y ago
  Actually they weren't even demonstrating. It was a gathering of people from inside and outside Amritsar, who came there for a festival. The order against gatherings of more than 4 people weren't distributed well, and so most of those people weren't aware of the order. Dyer then went and ordered the massacre.
WillyOnWheels 9y ago
I'm not an apologist for the former British Empire, but India's collection of tiny fiefdoms were basically lawless until the British showed up.
- rtx 9y ago
  Then why do you sound like one.
- septra 9y ago
  The Indian subcontinent had already experienced the Mauryan and the Mughal empires (both bringing immense prosperity to the region) before the British showed up and looted the place clean.
  - jhgb 9y ago
    It's fascinating how one can read claims such as "Mauryan and the Mughal empires bringing immense prosperity to the region" with no substantiation here and then read a scholarly work on the topic of history of world's economy that in connection with India talks about "wasteful use of resources and negligible levels of productive investment" or "little motive to improve landed property" or "[raising] so much in tax revenue ... [because] the rural population [was] very docile" or "long term stagnation and negligible levels of productive investment" or "no agricultural handbooks or governmental attempts to bolster agricultural productivity" or "crop yields ... stagnant over the long run" or ...
    - pm90 9y ago
      Absolutely, completely bullshit. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15313608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15313608 for a very detailed rebuttal.
      - jhgb 9y ago
        "Bullshit?" Do you offer a better overview material for world's economic history? Your "very detailed rebuttal" appears neither particularly detailed nor does it touch my response to the particular claim of "pre-British Indian empires bringing immense prosperity to the region" which (not the claim, the response to it) you can find for yourself in Maddison. But now that you mention it, in your "very detailed rebuttal", you find claims about destroying infrastructure. Setting aside the counterintuitive nature of even an exploitative regime destroying productive capital (to rob itself of profits?), Maddison outright claims that the colonial government increased irrigated area in India by a factor of eight. I'm not sure what else counts as infrastructure in a predominantly agricultural society but irrigation infrastructure has to rank pretty high on the list. So that sole claim of destruction can't possibly be the whole truth. I'd rather prefer a more reasonable response that your visceral knee-jerk reaction. "Absolutely, completely bullshit" is hardly a valuable feedback. I'm going to stick with Maddison for now until he gets surpassed.

chimeracoder 9y ago

> It is actually amazing how little British folks today know about their own historical misdeeds, they may accept the issues towards USA and other countries but tend to downplay atrocities magnitudes higher in India and other countries To add to this, it's not just the British. The Portuguese, French, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish (among others) colonized parts of India long before the British did, and the Portuguese and French also kept their colonies in India much longer. When people talk about India's independence in 1947, that's just referring to the independence of British India. The French stayed until 1962, and the Portuguese held their colonies until 1975. Amusingly, most Portuguese and French people I've talked to under the age of forty[0] or so are genuinely shocked to learn this. On the other hand, most British people are apparently proud of their colonial plundering[1], so I guess everyone has a long way to go still. (P.S. If you're thinking of responding to this with a comment about how the British "improved" India by industrializing it, or all the "benefits" India got from being plundered for 450 years, please save us all the trouble and don't. These are typical revisionist talking points that are easily debunked as ahistorical with some basic research, and they're put forth to distract from the sheer volume of wealth that was stolen, the amount of infrastructure that was destroyed by colonial regimes, the genocides and other war crimes that were committed by the colonizing countries, and so on. For most of recorded history, India (Bengal in particular) was the world's largest economy - over 25% of the world's GDP[2] - and every discussion that attempts to rationalize that loss after colonization without recognizing the value that was destroyed, stolen, or outright murdered ultimately into revisionist white supremacist history, which is not what HN is for.) I know I'll get eventually downvoted for this, because talking about the brutality and legacy of European colonialism is always unpopular on HN for obvious reasons, but it's important enough that it needs to be said. [0] ie, young enough that this wasn't in their lifetimes [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-people-are-proud-of-colonialism-and-the-british-empire-poll-finds-a6821206.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-people... [2] https://www.coursera.org/learn/passport-to-india/lecture/uYUIK/when-india-was-the-richest-country-on-earth https://www.coursera.org/learn/passport-to-india/lecture/uYU...

celticninja 9y ago
Imagine invading a country to essentially control it's natural resources. Thanks goodness we have moved on from that sort of behaviour and now we need some kind of moral reason (e.g war on terror) to do this to other countries (e.g. Iraq).
- jhgb 9y ago
  Have we really? Or did we simply move to more insidious policies like forcing "free trade treaties" and such?
itissid 9y ago
When things like the bengal famine happen because of just diverting India's supply chain to the WWII how the F* do you put up with something like that. If you haven't seen it already read the wikipedia entry[1] and pause and think for a moment, they denied food shipments for almost 2 full years in a famine. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
- nonamechicken 9y ago
  It's not just one famine. There have been many. It's estimated that anywhere from 10 to 40 million died in these alone. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-35-million-deaths-britain-shashi-tharoor-british-empire-a7627041.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-35-millio...
blackrock 9y ago
> If you're thinking of responding to this with a comment about how the British "improved" India by industrializing it, or all the "benefits" India got from being plundered for 450 years I once overheard my white coworker say, that the British did India a huge favor, by bringing them English. It was in his belief that back then, the Indians were just killing each other for fun. So the British did them a huge favor by colonizing them. And because of that, today, India is a major software player for outsourcing, all thanks to the British for colonizing them, and bringing them English. I sat there thinking to myself, this is unbelievable. I didn't want to talk politics in a business setting, so I ignored it. The British destroyed a civilization. Enslaved a generation. And enriched themselves in the process. But all that is swept under the rug, because they brought English to their colonies.

baursak 9y ago

Crimes of Britain is pretty informative Twitter account on this topic. Here's a sample of a lot more recent British history: https://twitter.com/crimesofbrits/status/905035282046742528 https://twitter.com/crimesofbrits/status/905035282046742528

rmdundon 9y ago
Interesting. However, when anything, such as that video, mentions "zionism", that automatically triggers my anti-Semite radar.
- baursak 9y ago
  I also used to think that anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism, until I learned more about it. There are plenty of anti-Zionist Jews, both inside and outside Israel. This short clip explains the difference pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7dJLP3L0Xw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7dJLP3L0Xw
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > There are plenty of anti-Zionist Jews, both inside and outside Israel Yes, Zionism was originally a minority nationalist movement within the Orthodox and Conservative Jewish communities. Only more recently did they become larger, empowered in part for political reasons by other political powers. There are still large sects of Orthodox Judaism that believe that the existence of Israel actually prevents the Messiah from coming, because the true Israeli state will be founded by the Messiah. In short: it's complicated. Not all Jews are Xionists, and not a Zionists are Jewish (anti-Semitic white nationalists are actually big supporters of Israel for reasons that aren't too surprising if you think about their motivations and the implications). And the reverse is true in both directions for people who oppose Zionism or the current Israeli state.
  - smogcutter 9y ago
    Speaking as an anti-zionist Jew, I'm generally extremely suspicious of gentiles who throw the word "zionist" around. Within the Jewish population there's a broad spectrum of opinion between AIPAC and Jewish Voice for Peace. In the mouths of the goyim, though, "zionists" doesn't often mean "supporters of Israeli nationalism". It means "the cabal of hebrews who manipulate world affairs to their own profit." Even though it's not the dictionary definition, that context is inextricable and often deliberate. For myself, I'm perfectly comfortable with a non-Jew calling themselves anti-Israel. That's just politics. But anti-zionist? Now I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

apsec112 9y ago

AFAICT, the British Empire gets much more criticism for its various evils than other historical empires do. Very few people in the West, for example, even know about the ethnic cleansing of the Greeks under the Ottoman Empire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide), and that was less than a century ago. Probably the worst European colonialists were the Belgians, of all people, under King Leopold II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...). And I've virtually never heard anyone talk about all the wars and conquests in India before the British came. The Mughal Empire was not conquered with sunshine and rainbows, etc.

jacquesm 9y ago
The Dutch VOC is right up there.
gizmodo59 9y ago
I'm not sure why you are bringing this point. OP is not saying British are worse than Ottoman or other empires.(Two Wrongs Make A Right Fallacy)
- apsec112 9y ago
  The claim seemed to be that historical British crimes were disproportionately ignored, compared to historical crimes committed by other countries. I am arguing against this by pointing to other crimes that (I'm guessing) most Westerners don't even know about.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - pgeorgi 9y ago
    The Mughal empire mistreating Indians has a slightly different relevance to Westerners than some Western empire doing the same. Not knowing about Mughal is ignorance, while not learning about the bad sides of our own history is (often: culturally imposed) revisionism.

travmatt 9y ago

I've heard some Brits complain about American misdeeds throughout the Middle East without a hint hypocrisy crossing their face.

rhaps0dy 9y ago
Right, but that's happening _now_ so we (well, the people who are doing it) have the power to prevent it.
Balero 9y ago
These are individual people. If the British government was to complain, then that could be considered hypocritical. But an individual person can't be held to account for actions taken, by others and (quite probably) before they were born.
- srean 9y ago
  What if they are still benefiting from those historical acts ?
  - TallGuyShort 9y ago
    Name a country where you can live without unknowingly benefiting from some atrocity in the past.
    - gertef 9y ago
      Not the point. Whoever you are, if you have ill-gotten gains (more than average at least), even as a gift, you have a moral obligation to use them to counter the ill.
GauntletWizard 9y ago
There's a scene in the first episode of Sherlock where it's pointed out that Dr. Watson is a "British doctor injured in the war in Afghanistan" - I laughed. Apparently I was the only one in my circle of friends who got that that was the original character's biography, written in 1887!

neximo64 9y ago

The most interesting thing, these misdeeds are judged with the very eyes of morality created by the British themselves.

sol_remmy 9y ago

Misdeeds of the British aristocracy. Leave my grandparents out of this. IF you ever meet a Englishman from nobility, know that he is culpable to blame for all of this.

horsecaptin 9y ago
Common folk everywhere have more in common with each other than they have with people in power. The problem is that they are constantly fooled into believing otherwise. This is why our grandparents shouldn't be left out of this. All too often children are taught blind devotion to one's country, when in reality this means blind devotion to the leaders. Things have gotten better though. We have elections and the internet. We can more openly sympathize and empathize and learn and hopefully this will make us all better together.
- sol_remmy 9y ago
  Huh so my great-grandparents that were farming in the middle of the country side are to blame for this? They didn't even receive newspapers. The only way they could have protested the government back then was refusing to pay taxes. And that would have gotten them killed.
  - gertef 9y ago
    "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edmundburk377528.html https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edmundburk377528...
quotemstr 9y ago
> IF you ever meet a Englishman from nobility, know that he is culpable to blame for all of this. So you believe in inherited guilt? I reject that idea. None of us is responsible for the actions of our ancestors.

weerd 9y ago

There's a quote I really enjoy from a German historian that nicely describes this: "There are un-tragic peoples, whom history pearls off of like water from a well-polished boot." - Rolf Peter Sieferle

pmyteh 9y ago

It's covered in school history classes, sufficiently anti-colonially for a certain slice of conservative talking heads to decry Britain 'talking down its glorious past'. My class covered the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in some depth at age 15; a lovely example of late Empire brutality where one of our army officers ordered machine guns turned on a non-violent crowd who were demonstrating in breach of government order. So it's not covered in any depth, but the empire certainly isn't celebrated uncritically in school or in other official contexts.

newen 9y ago
Actually they weren't even demonstrating. It was a gathering of people from inside and outside Amritsar, who came there for a festival. The order against gatherings of more than 4 people weren't distributed well, and so most of those people weren't aware of the order. Dyer then went and ordered the massacre.

WillyOnWheels 9y ago

I'm not an apologist for the former British Empire, but India's collection of tiny fiefdoms were basically lawless until the British showed up.

rtx 9y ago
Then why do you sound like one.
septra 9y ago
The Indian subcontinent had already experienced the Mauryan and the Mughal empires (both bringing immense prosperity to the region) before the British showed up and looted the place clean.
- jhgb 9y ago
  It's fascinating how one can read claims such as "Mauryan and the Mughal empires bringing immense prosperity to the region" with no substantiation here and then read a scholarly work on the topic of history of world's economy that in connection with India talks about "wasteful use of resources and negligible levels of productive investment" or "little motive to improve landed property" or "[raising] so much in tax revenue ... [because] the rural population [was] very docile" or "long term stagnation and negligible levels of productive investment" or "no agricultural handbooks or governmental attempts to bolster agricultural productivity" or "crop yields ... stagnant over the long run" or ...
  - pm90 9y ago
    Absolutely, completely bullshit. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15313608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15313608 for a very detailed rebuttal.
    - jhgb 9y ago
      "Bullshit?" Do you offer a better overview material for world's economic history? Your "very detailed rebuttal" appears neither particularly detailed nor does it touch my response to the particular claim of "pre-British Indian empires bringing immense prosperity to the region" which (not the claim, the response to it) you can find for yourself in Maddison. But now that you mention it, in your "very detailed rebuttal", you find claims about destroying infrastructure. Setting aside the counterintuitive nature of even an exploitative regime destroying productive capital (to rob itself of profits?), Maddison outright claims that the colonial government increased irrigated area in India by a factor of eight. I'm not sure what else counts as infrastructure in a predominantly agricultural society but irrigation infrastructure has to rank pretty high on the list. So that sole claim of destruction can't possibly be the whole truth. I'd rather prefer a more reasonable response that your visceral knee-jerk reaction. "Absolutely, completely bullshit" is hardly a valuable feedback. I'm going to stick with Maddison for now until he gets surpassed.