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New research on the cost of colonization to India
- cslarson 8y ago1 hr + 44 points + no comments = upvote manipulation
- polotics 8y agoNope. Casebin point: I upvoted this, but it leaves me pretty speechless.
- dang 8y agoNo, that happens fairly often without upvote manipulation, and as far as I can tell this post wasn't affected by such manipulation.
- pm90 8y agoIt 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
- t1o5 8y agoA sizable chunk of users awake at this time of the day are descendants of the very same colonialists. What did you expect ?
- perfmode 8y agoPeople should be able to look at their past without knee jerk dismissal. Let’s face it. The British haven’t always treated others nicely.
- dang 8y agoAnti-Facebook stories certainly haven't mostly been flagged, except insofar as some users are tired of seeing so many, which would be a "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" phenomenon. Stories about colonialism sometimes get flagged, presumably because they give rise to ideological and (worse) racial and national flamewar. But there have been many on Hacker News' front page over the years, as well. The thing to watch out for with such perceptions, besides sample bias, is that we're all more likely to notice what we dislike than what we agree with. If a story I like gets flagged, that registers probably 100x as strongly as a story I like not getting flagged. So even a perfectly even-handed forum will seem unfair and biased in any area you feel strongly about. Not that HN is a perfectly even-handed forum—but what's going on is a lot more stochastic than these perceptions seem. Edit: having looked at the story, I think probably what tipped the balance for flags over upvotes was the obviously baity title. Threads are sensitive to initial conditions, and a title like that guarantees a bad thread, regardless of how justified it might be. I've edited the title and turned off the flags.
- wjnc 8y agoMy government uses my taxes to buy goods and services in the local market. Is that defrauding or just the nature of providing government? This article is on somewhat loose economic grounds, I fear. People paid taxes, albeit to the coloniser, some people could sell their goods at market prices. Things we still find pretty reasonable. On top of that compounding at 5% for 250 yrs is not a good way to create current dollars. That's a compound factor of 200k. Five dollars of taxes in the early periods equals one million dollars in their narrative.
- pickdenis 8y agoWhen the government buys things with tax money, the things are supposed to be used for the benefit of people who paid the taxes. It doesn't seem like the Company even pretended that this was the case.
- kolbe 8y agoMost tax dollars in most countries are not spent on goods and services for the benefit of the people who paid them.
- pickdenis 8y agoBut there's at least a pretense that it (goods purchased with tax money) will be, right? Forget about what actually happens for a moment and consider that the tax-collecting colonists didn't even seem to bother with such a pretense. The way I understand it, they just bought the goods, turned around, and sold them again (which does not align with any notion of "providing government"). Of course, I know very little about economics or history, but I just wanted to point out what I thought was a logical inconsistency in the root comment.
- kolbe 8y agoI disagree. The pretense makes it worse. I think there's something far more comforting about the honesty of a government just stealing my money and owning up to it. Don't waste time and distort my perception of the world with that bullshit.
- facistsSuck 8y agoMeh. The mughals were a lot worse. I’d take the British any day
- c-smile 8y agoIn fact colonies were the engine that created Western Democracies. At ancient Greece time, where democracy as a term was coined, "demos kratos" meant power of voting citizens. Where the citizen is a "respectful person" - wealthy guy - slave owner at least. Nothing have changed in principle since then, it just slave ownership became "remote". How many African, South American, Indian gold coins lie under each stone of those beautiful European plazas? Yes, without that cache flow the humanity might had no Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution as they were so all this is not that black and white. We just need to understand that.
- pm90 8y agoThank 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’t happen because of this. I’m still not sure how to deal with it, but research such as this at least helps in ensuring that the truth is spelt out and hopefully something that we learn from and not repeat in the future.
- InGodsName 8y agoI never read any account from travellers (from Europe/China) describing India as poor before colonialism. So, i think this article does have some validity.
- iguy 8y agoIf 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.
- pm90 8y agoNope, 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.
- iguy 8y agoI don't know why you're insulting me when it sounds like you agree with me. You can compare different regions at the same time, and in the pre-industrial world, per-capita incomes didn't vary a whole lot -- maybe over a factor of 2. Whether you want to call this "mired in poverty" or not depends on your taste in adjectives, but India was not exceptional. The huge differences (factors of 10, even 100) arose only later, because of some pulling ahead.
- yumraj 8y agoTo 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 to be a threat. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_economy_of_the_Indian_subcontinent#Colonial_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_economy_of_the...
- pm90 8y agoThe counter argument is that a unified subcontinent would degrade into chaos as people kept fighting each other internally. Although, India itself has remained largely democratic (perhaps overlooking the Maoist insurgency) so maybe that wasn’t a huge concern.
- sgift 8y ago> 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 to be a threat. Which they weren't forced too. That's not a "cost" of colonization but a cost of not choosing another path.
- tareqak 8y agoThey weren't forced to partition, but they were led down that path by the British in an attempt to divide them as they left. The thinking was that the divided former colonies would drive themselves into such a state such that they would invite their colonial masters back to rule over them. There was definitely religious violence in South Asia before colonization, but the scale and depth definitely increased during and after.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> And, India got partitioned into 3 countries Technically two, one of which had non-contiguous parts which later had a falling out.
- t1o5 8y agoAn excellent speech by Dr Shashi Tharoor - "Britain Does Owe Reparations to India" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shashi_Tharoor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shashi_Tharoor
- pm90 8y agoThis article must not be flagged
- tezza 8y agoHang 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/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/06/animated_interactive_of_the_history_of_the_atlantic_slave_trade.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_s... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_War
- dang 8y agoPlease 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 do this here.
- somebadguy 8y agoYeah yeah whatever
- maxxxxx 8y agoIs 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.
- dang 8y agoThe 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.
- justboxing 8y agoI 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 generations of Indians living on the sidewalks next to each other, from Grandpa to Grandson. They eat, cook, shower and sleep all in a 4 or 5 Sq Foot area. Towards the end of our trip, we visited Queen Victoria’s Memorial Hall. There was a small Museum in 1 corner of that Palace, which had photos and newspaper stories about Calcutta from the time the East India Company arrived to the time they left. There, I learned that Calcutta was the Capital of the British Raj in India for a very long time. One of the plaques in that museum gave the reasoning for the British Raj for choosing Calcutta as the Capital. Apparently Calcutta was the richest city in India when the East India company arrived. It was flush with natural resources, grains and wealth accumulated by the Rajas and Indian Kings who ruled before. By the time moved their Capital from Calcutta to Delhi and then left India few years later, they’d plunders everything from that City. Ask any Indian about Calcutta and the first thing they’ll say is how dirty and piss-broke it is. But most don’t know why it is so. I attribute the state of this once great city directly to the British Raj robbing it blind over a century or two.
- pm90 8y agoCalcutta was a tiny village when the British arrived.
- alienreborn 8y ago> In 1750, Calcutta had a population of 120,000 From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Kolkata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Kolkata
- iguy 8y agoThat's a century years after they arrived -- read the link!
- justaguyhere 8y agoAny idea why this article is flagged? It isn't a bad article
- dang 8y agoSee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18683542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18683542.
- dhbradshaw 8y agoThe 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.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> 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 their land.
- dhbradshaw 8y agoI'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.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> I'm thinking more of Africa, where you had the colonies side by side. 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.
- throwayasdf23 8y agoThis 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 for proto-investors is dubious to say the least. 2) The timeline doesn't fit for claiming that colonial India dramatically benefited the imperial center or periphery. The UK was industrializing and ahead of the rest of Europe before revenues from India are supposed to have made a difference yet fell behind countries like Germany(which lacked any colonies until the late 19th century) even as revenues from India were supposedly diverted. The periphery is no better, Canada and Australia fell behind the US even with the supposed surplus from India. 3) I'm skeptical that diverted taxes from a mostly agricultural society like India could have produced the bonanza suggested in this article. Existing Per capita taxes would have been onerous enough and not much more could have been meaningfully extracted from the peasantry. A pre-modern society has enough problems with basic economic management and political stability; sustaining a massive bureaucracy necessary to collect taxes without rents diverted to local elites doesn't make a lot of sense. 4) As an addendum to (3) the early East India Company lacked the ability to even administer the country without the cooperation of elites(which required the dispersal of rents). The later imperial bureaucracy necessary to administer India was by all accounts quite expensive. There just isn't the gigantic return form skimming off taxes that is suggested in the article.
- diffoperator 8y agoWhy did you create a throwaway to post this?
- tomcam 8y agoProbably 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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- amvalo 8y ago>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 - theft on a grand scale. Yet most Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat. This sounds needlessly circuitous. Money is fungible, so how is this different from saying the British overtaxing them? The actual book this article refers to doesn't seem to push such a weird argument (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/dispossession-deprivation-and-development/9788193732915 https://cup.columbia.edu/book/dispossession-deprivation-and-...).
- sandworm101 8y agoYa, 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.
- shripadk 8y ago> This sounds needlessly circuitous. Money is fungible, so how is this different from saying the British overtaxing them? 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.
- lallysingh 8y ago> Centuries of poverty and suffering could have been prevented.
- a11r 8y agoAlso, the population growth rate in India was significantly lower during the colonial period (1750 to 1950). This was primarily due to increased mortality from the famines created by the British. Over a 200 year period, the British colonialists performed the largest instance of genocide known to humanity.
- kolbe 8y ago2018 morality applied to 1800's people.
- GreeniFi 8y agoThis is an interesting article. I do understand why pieces like this get flagged, but I also wonder whether we need to embrace these discussions rather than suppress them. To my point, I’m not supporting Empire, but in the time of the Raj, the East India Company was tightly held by British aristocrats and was not Britain. In turn Britain as controlled by the state was not the British people. As well as using Indian profits to wreak havoc globally, it was used to maintain dominance in Britain by the state. [Edited for clarity]
- newyankee 8y agoNever forget that Winston Churchill let millions in Bengal starve to death because they were not civilized people according to him. Modern day Indians do acknowledge that history is complex, nuanced and there were many factors that led to the colonization of India. However the sheer ignorance of a lot of Western folks to British and other colonial atrocities is alarming. For them the history starts and ends with their own lens and seldom beyond the same Greek/ Roman/ Judeo mythology and/or history. It is funny for example when so many call the modern no system the Arabic no system when in fact the Arabians merely took it from India and exported it westwards (an important feat) There is a reason why Western civilization became so powerful - conquering large territories (Aus, Ca, NZ etc.) , resources, imposing their culture. I really commend the self respect Chinese have in this regard. They consider this century as the one where China regains its lost glory. I hope India can manage to become economically better although i doubt it would ever come even close to China.
- calebm 8y agoThis makes me appreciate the American Revolution all the more.
- deogeo 8y ago> 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.
- rvn1045 8y agoShashi 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4
- gumby 8y agoI 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.
- gumby 8y agoFrom 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.
- enitihas 8y agoBritish rule being a net positive for India is an even bigger joke than David Cameron being the best British prime minister of all time. My history teacher showed us the famous trade triangle involving China->Britan-India. Chinese tea to Britain, Indian opium to China, and British Raj(rule) to India.
- known 8y agoWhy Britain Doesn’t Owe India Reparations http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2015/07/29/the-counterview-why-britain-doesnt-owe-india-reparations/ http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2015/07/29/the-countervie... And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Caste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Caste owe Reparations to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Backward_Class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Backward_Class in India since http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/caste-is-not-past.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/caste-is-no... and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shashi-tharoor/caste-wont-disappear-india_b_6257354.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shashi-tharoor/caste-wont-disa... And check which Caste is looting India? https://www.quora.com/Which-caste-is-looting-India/answer/Adarsh-Sapoota https://www.quora.com/Which-caste-is-looting-India/answer/Ad...
- known 8y agoExcept India, Afghanistan - Australia - Bahrain - Barbados - Canada - Cyprus - Egypt - Fiji - Israel - Iraq - Jamaica - Jordan - Kenya - Kuwait - Libya - Malaysia - Nigeria - NZ - Pakistan - Sri Lanka - South Africa - Sudan - Tanzania - UAE - USA - Zimbabwe are not accusing Britain of plunder. https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/955470121232994304 https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/955470121232994304