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Other key success factors for the East India Company included warfare, slavery, and legally enforced monopolies. The EIC was only wound down after their misrul

Other key success factors for the East India Company included warfare, slavery, and legally enforced monopolies. The EIC was only wound down after their misrule incited a full-fledged rebellion that killed 6,000 British people (which caused outrage back home) and on the order of 800,000 Indians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857

hnbad 4y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. Even the most exaggerated claims about the "death toll of communism" tend to fall short of estimates of the total death toll of British rule of its colonies (the Holodomor pales in comparison to the preventable famines in India alone) and the British East India Company played no small part in this. We really should have a more critical lense of colonialism nowadays and abandon the badly aging romanticization of it.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Famines were common and cyclical in India prior to British colonization as well. There are certain ones you can pin on the British, like in 1943, but it would be a feat to get close to the deaths from communism. And even then you’re comparing an empire that was quite openly exploiting who they viewed as lesser people, versus governments who devastated their own populations through good intentions. (I also find it funny to see the top response criticizing the obviously Indian author for failing to talk about something other than war and famine. Folks love their poverty porn, huh?)
  - exBarrelSpoiler 4y ago
    They just find it distasteful. It’s like reading a productivity article about the best tips to be a more effective organizer by learning from the mistakes of Operation Searchlight in failing to put down the East Pakistani insurgency.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - dundarious 4y ago
    There were also famines in the 1870s-1890s where the extent of the death toll was mostly determined by British administration and imposition of laissez-faire capitalism and Malthusian ideology.
  - subtra3t 4y ago
    - renewiltord 4y ago
      The user you reply to spends a lot of time on HN and topics on South Asia frequently have them weigh in with this angle. Not picking on him or anything. Just that this may be less widespread than it appears because of high throughput users.
      - rayiner 4y ago
        Desi attitudes on the British are fragmented. My parents were technically born in the Dominion of Pakistan, and her older siblings remember the Empire. My mom and her sisters have quite a positive view—if you were a young woman hoping to get an education and a career British influence in the country probably held some appeal. My dad has what I had thought was a fairly negative view, but less so than most Americans I have met.
    - hnbad 4y ago
      To qualify this further, "actually famines are normal and okay for these people" was also the attitude used by the British during the 100% British caused Irish potato famine which reduced the population of Ireland to a point it still has only barely recovered from. Droughts and other weather events can be cyclical, but famines rarely are because humans are actually fairly good at adapting to cycles like that and plan accordingly. However colonial governments tend to ignore any preexisting systems and primarily focus on extracting surplus of the barest minimum to keep the colonized alive, rather than building reserves for these catastrophes. And that's when the colonial power doesn't intentionally slaughter, maim or execute people to cull the "excess population" (which arguably was part of the motivation behind the Irish famine as the Irish Catholics were seen as being at risk of outbreeding the British Protestants). Frankly, I don't think it's good or desirable to model any modern company after an enterprise built on extracting as much surplus value as possible from people who were not permitted any rights to object. That seems like the exact opposite of the kind of company I would consider good or desirable. It's the kind of company I would like to see made illegal if at all possible.
  - hnbad 4y ago
    > And even then you’re comparing an empire that was quite openly exploiting who they viewed as lesser people, versus governments who devastated their own populations through good intentions. Funny. That's exactly how most people who keep talking about the Holodomor say the Soviet Union viewed the Kulaks. > I also find it funny to see the top response criticizing the obviously Indian author for failing to talk about something other than war and famine. He's not talking about "something other than war and famine", he's romanticizing a company that literally killed and oppressed millions of people in the history of his own country. He can simply not do that, without having to only talk about victimhood. Black Americans can talk about other things than how cotton plantations were a great business model actually without talking about how slavery was bad. It's just very odd to focus so much on the supposed positives of an overall extremely bad thing. This is very much a "I just want the trains to run on time" kind of situation.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      > bad. It's just very odd to focus so much on the supposed positives of an overall extremely bad thing. This is very much a "I just want the trains to run on time" kind of situation. I for one want to know how the East India Company managed to colonize a vastly more populous and historically wealthier civilization. There’s certainly lessons in there. After all, you can’t undo those things, but you can make the trains run on time. And the lives of Indians in the present would be better if the trains ran on time.
      - exBarrelSpoiler 4y ago
        The article does provide interesting, educational details, but it also engages in a lot of gratuitous cheerleading of the BEIC and makes comparisons to modern day startups. Wonks celebrating imperialism for business lessons. It’s ghoulish and absurdly tasteless. You can expect something like that from say the War Nerd, but the style and framing of this article is just wildly inappropriate.
        rayiner 4y ago
        > Wonks celebrating imperialism for business lessons First, the article does plenty of throat clearing about those issues. Second, empires are impressive. Can the French or British find things to admire about the Romans?
  - shakow 4y ago
    > Famines were common and cyclical in India prior to British colonization as well. The very same can be said about the Russian empire/the USSR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia... > And even then you’re comparing an empire that was quite openly exploiting who they viewed as lesser people, versus governments who devastated their own populations through good intentions. Sorry, which one is the UK and which one is the USSR here?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - chsreekar 4y ago
    If someone starts pinning the (continued) deaths due to the disturbance of social customs and divide-and-rule by the British (Also account for the partition). It may far surpass it
    - hnbad 4y ago
      To anyone who thinks this is obvious hyperbole: please look into the causes of the Rwandan genocide. Specifically the ahistorical division of the local population into two competing tribes by the Belgian colonial government. Divide-and-rule is a long standing tradition because it prevents the colonized from unifying and rising up against the colonizers by giving one group preferential treatment over the others.
- trention 4y ago
  - shadowfox 4y ago
    What in your opinion are the positives that came out of colonialism?
    - trention 4y ago
      We are not discussing the correctness of the argument, we are discussing the comment that the argument is being "overmade" which is blatantly false.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    It's rather difficult to find a whole lot that's positive about colonialism, when you look into the details. For example, it's true that the British colonials brought railway technology to India, which has of course become a signature feature of modern Indian civilization. However, the rationale at the time was more about having the ability to rapidly move large numbers of troops and guns from one rebellious hotspot to another. However, this also had many economic benefits for other sectors, aided in moving food and preventing famines, etc. https://reconasia.csis.org/how-britians-colonial-railways-transformed-india/ https://reconasia.csis.org/how-britians-colonial-railways-tr... > "After a slow start in 1853, the construction of the railway network envisaged by Lord Dalhousie was sped up rapidly after the 1857 Rebellion. The railways were an instrument of control. The stations became fortresses, the white and, later, the Eurasian, staff became an auxiliary army, and the tracks became lines of communication in the event of conflict. The 1857 Rebellion, coming as it did at a crucial stage in railway development, had an enormous impact on the railways’ eventual shape and the attitude of the British colonial rulers to their Indian subordinates. This was a nakedly military project, but not solely one. There were immeasurable economic benefits, too, and though the very design of the railways was as conduits to and from the ports to help British imports and exports, inevitably the Indian economy received a stimulus through their construction." The argument that such colonialism was necessary to spread knowledge and technology (which is really the only pro-colonialism argument I can think of) is belied by the example of Japan, which strongly resisted colonial efforts for many centuries, but was still able to rapidly adopt and develop things like train technology.

hnbad 4y ago

Thanks for pointing this out. Even the most exaggerated claims about the "death toll of communism" tend to fall short of estimates of the total death toll of British rule of its colonies (the Holodomor pales in comparison to the preventable famines in India alone) and the British East India Company played no small part in this. We really should have a more critical lense of colonialism nowadays and abandon the badly aging romanticization of it.

rayiner 4y ago
Famines were common and cyclical in India prior to British colonization as well. There are certain ones you can pin on the British, like in 1943, but it would be a feat to get close to the deaths from communism. And even then you’re comparing an empire that was quite openly exploiting who they viewed as lesser people, versus governments who devastated their own populations through good intentions. (I also find it funny to see the top response criticizing the obviously Indian author for failing to talk about something other than war and famine. Folks love their poverty porn, huh?)
- exBarrelSpoiler 4y ago
  They just find it distasteful. It’s like reading a productivity article about the best tips to be a more effective organizer by learning from the mistakes of Operation Searchlight in failing to put down the East Pakistani insurgency.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pessimizer 4y ago
  [flagged]
- dundarious 4y ago
  There were also famines in the 1870s-1890s where the extent of the death toll was mostly determined by British administration and imposition of laissez-faire capitalism and Malthusian ideology.
- subtra3t 4y ago
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    The user you reply to spends a lot of time on HN and topics on South Asia frequently have them weigh in with this angle. Not picking on him or anything. Just that this may be less widespread than it appears because of high throughput users.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      Desi attitudes on the British are fragmented. My parents were technically born in the Dominion of Pakistan, and her older siblings remember the Empire. My mom and her sisters have quite a positive view—if you were a young woman hoping to get an education and a career British influence in the country probably held some appeal. My dad has what I had thought was a fairly negative view, but less so than most Americans I have met.
  - hnbad 4y ago
    To qualify this further, "actually famines are normal and okay for these people" was also the attitude used by the British during the 100% British caused Irish potato famine which reduced the population of Ireland to a point it still has only barely recovered from. Droughts and other weather events can be cyclical, but famines rarely are because humans are actually fairly good at adapting to cycles like that and plan accordingly. However colonial governments tend to ignore any preexisting systems and primarily focus on extracting surplus of the barest minimum to keep the colonized alive, rather than building reserves for these catastrophes. And that's when the colonial power doesn't intentionally slaughter, maim or execute people to cull the "excess population" (which arguably was part of the motivation behind the Irish famine as the Irish Catholics were seen as being at risk of outbreeding the British Protestants). Frankly, I don't think it's good or desirable to model any modern company after an enterprise built on extracting as much surplus value as possible from people who were not permitted any rights to object. That seems like the exact opposite of the kind of company I would consider good or desirable. It's the kind of company I would like to see made illegal if at all possible.
- hnbad 4y ago
  > And even then you’re comparing an empire that was quite openly exploiting who they viewed as lesser people, versus governments who devastated their own populations through good intentions. Funny. That's exactly how most people who keep talking about the Holodomor say the Soviet Union viewed the Kulaks. > I also find it funny to see the top response criticizing the obviously Indian author for failing to talk about something other than war and famine. He's not talking about "something other than war and famine", he's romanticizing a company that literally killed and oppressed millions of people in the history of his own country. He can simply not do that, without having to only talk about victimhood. Black Americans can talk about other things than how cotton plantations were a great business model actually without talking about how slavery was bad. It's just very odd to focus so much on the supposed positives of an overall extremely bad thing. This is very much a "I just want the trains to run on time" kind of situation.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    > bad. It's just very odd to focus so much on the supposed positives of an overall extremely bad thing. This is very much a "I just want the trains to run on time" kind of situation. I for one want to know how the East India Company managed to colonize a vastly more populous and historically wealthier civilization. There’s certainly lessons in there. After all, you can’t undo those things, but you can make the trains run on time. And the lives of Indians in the present would be better if the trains ran on time.
    - exBarrelSpoiler 4y ago
      The article does provide interesting, educational details, but it also engages in a lot of gratuitous cheerleading of the BEIC and makes comparisons to modern day startups. Wonks celebrating imperialism for business lessons. It’s ghoulish and absurdly tasteless. You can expect something like that from say the War Nerd, but the style and framing of this article is just wildly inappropriate.
      - rayiner 4y ago
        > Wonks celebrating imperialism for business lessons First, the article does plenty of throat clearing about those issues. Second, empires are impressive. Can the French or British find things to admire about the Romans?
- shakow 4y ago
  > Famines were common and cyclical in India prior to British colonization as well. The very same can be said about the Russian empire/the USSR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia... > And even then you’re comparing an empire that was quite openly exploiting who they viewed as lesser people, versus governments who devastated their own populations through good intentions. Sorry, which one is the UK and which one is the USSR here?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- chsreekar 4y ago
  If someone starts pinning the (continued) deaths due to the disturbance of social customs and divide-and-rule by the British (Also account for the partition). It may far surpass it
  - hnbad 4y ago
    To anyone who thinks this is obvious hyperbole: please look into the causes of the Rwandan genocide. Specifically the ahistorical division of the local population into two competing tribes by the Belgian colonial government. Divide-and-rule is a long standing tradition because it prevents the colonized from unifying and rising up against the colonizers by giving one group preferential treatment over the others.
trention 4y ago
- shadowfox 4y ago
  What in your opinion are the positives that came out of colonialism?
  - trention 4y ago
    We are not discussing the correctness of the argument, we are discussing the comment that the argument is being "overmade" which is blatantly false.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  It's rather difficult to find a whole lot that's positive about colonialism, when you look into the details. For example, it's true that the British colonials brought railway technology to India, which has of course become a signature feature of modern Indian civilization. However, the rationale at the time was more about having the ability to rapidly move large numbers of troops and guns from one rebellious hotspot to another. However, this also had many economic benefits for other sectors, aided in moving food and preventing famines, etc. https://reconasia.csis.org/how-britians-colonial-railways-transformed-india/ https://reconasia.csis.org/how-britians-colonial-railways-tr... > "After a slow start in 1853, the construction of the railway network envisaged by Lord Dalhousie was sped up rapidly after the 1857 Rebellion. The railways were an instrument of control. The stations became fortresses, the white and, later, the Eurasian, staff became an auxiliary army, and the tracks became lines of communication in the event of conflict. The 1857 Rebellion, coming as it did at a crucial stage in railway development, had an enormous impact on the railways’ eventual shape and the attitude of the British colonial rulers to their Indian subordinates. This was a nakedly military project, but not solely one. There were immeasurable economic benefits, too, and though the very design of the railways was as conduits to and from the ports to help British imports and exports, inevitably the Indian economy received a stimulus through their construction." The argument that such colonialism was necessary to spread knowledge and technology (which is really the only pro-colonialism argument I can think of) is belied by the example of Japan, which strongly resisted colonial efforts for many centuries, but was still able to rapidly adopt and develop things like train technology.