
New research on the cost of colonization to India - yarapavan
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/britain-stole-45-trillion-india-181206124830851.html
======
justboxing
I 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.

~~~
iguy
This is not correct, Calcutta was some villages where it happened to be
convenient for the east india company to set up shop: "The area where the city
is now located was originally inhabited by the people of three villages:
Kalikata, Sutanuti and Gobindapur."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Kolkata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Kolkata)

Delhi on the other hand was a great city, many times over (and sacked, and re-
built, by rules of many tongues).

But it's also important to know that when we say an ancient place was rich, we
mean that the kings were rich & built big palaces etc. Peasants were poor
everywhere in the pre-industrial world, with variations but not enormous ones,
like the difference between 500 and 1000 USD/year.

When we say that a modern place is rich, we mean the average guy instead. And,
sometimes, that their city is well-run and finds money to spend on public
services etc. Which, in my understanding, Calcutta has not been in the last 50
years, compared to other Indian cities. However I would still bet that the
median income has increased monotonically.

~~~
ganeshkrishnan
Nope, op is correct. One rule of the thumb in India is that closer the area is
to British rule, the more poor and plundered it is.

Auroville in South was plundered and the colonists burnt the forests around it
leaving it completely barren. It was recently rebuilt and is still work in
progress to return it back to the original state

------
throwayasdf23
This 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.

~~~
a11r
A simple statistic: Before the British showed up, Indian GDP was 15 to 20% of
world GDP. When they left its was 1.5 to 3% of world GDP. Something tells me
the colonial experience might have something to do with it.

~~~
iguy
No this is nonsense. That relative decline was because the pie grew... and
grew spectacularly, for the first time in history, for reasons that had next
to nothing to do with some colonial adventure.

~~~
porpoisely
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 ( although britain
loves to pretend it did in the 1700s ). Parts of europe followed soon after.
Japan industrialized in the late 1800s. India ( and china ) industrialized
after ww2 - india much more slowly than china due to its democratic and
bureaucratic baggage. For more than 100 years, india was prevented from
industrializing by britain. You can't ignore that significant opportunity
cost.

Also, you are wrong when you say colonial "adventure" had nothing to do with
industrialization. Excess capital and excess resources are the prerequisites
for national industrialization. British industrialization was funded by opium
money from china and resources from india. The need for resources is why japan
and germany sought to create empires for themselves. It was a necessity to
industrialize.

Having said that, I don't think you can honestly calculate the costs of
colonization because there are so many factors involved. Would india have been
able to follow meiji japan's or even mao's china's example and industrialize?
We can say that india lost a lot due to british imperialism, but I doubt we'll
ever know exactly how much. At best, it's just a guess.

~~~
graeme
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.
Only when the "License Raj" was done away with several decades later did India
start to grow quickly. (In other words, mere absensce of colonization was not
sufficient for growth)

~~~
shripadk
Don't forget to also take into account population difference between India and
Japan and the difference in land area. Also, don't forget that one of the
gravest sins committed by British was to Partition India into two halves on
the basis of Religion which caused millions to be displaced and millions more
to die in communal clashes. By partitioning India on the basis of Religion
resources were distributed unevenly. Even to this day, both halves of the once
Undivided India are fighting over water resources. Many in India believe it
was a deliberate ploy to keep always keep disharmony in India even after
Independence. India never achieved true Independence for a really long time.

------
pm90
Thank 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
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.

~~~
iguy
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 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
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.

~~~
iguy
I 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
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 to be a threat.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_economy_of_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_economy_of_the_Indian_subcontinent#Colonial_period)

~~~
sachdevap
> India got partitioned into 3 countries ...

This is a huge simplification of the history of the Indian subcontinent. The
British are the architects of the new boundary lines, but they are also the
architects of what is now a unified country, India. Indian subcontinent as a
unified entity prior to the arrival of the British as a major colonizing force
in India is a lie. India was quite divided before that, which made it easy for
them to play their little game of "divide and rule".

None of this absolves them of responsibility, but this over-simplified
statement irks me, as it is a gross misrepresentation of the politics of the
Indian subcontinent prior to the British.

~~~
drieddust
> India was quite divided before that, which made it easy for them to play
> their little game of "divide and rule".

The fact that entire region was called Bharat escapes you I think. Just before
British India was centrally organized and ruled by Mughals and Marathas so
your argument does not stand.

As far as "divide and rule" is concerned, due to the vastness of India
regional leadership was always delegated. British utilized this structure to
their advantage.

~~~
gumby
> The fact that entire region was called Bharat...

I don't think that important fact inherently implies a unity that was never
there. The(roughly defined) region called "Europe" has never been under the
control of a unitary state or empire, even in the times of the Romans.

~~~
drieddust
Europe is a continent and not a country and Romans did rule almost entire
continent.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire#/media/File:Roman...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire#/media/File:Roman_Empire_Trajan_117AD.png)

------
tezza
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/life/the_history_of_american_s...](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/06/animated_interactive_of_the_history_of_the_atlantic_slave_trade.html)

[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
Please 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.

~~~
maxxxxx
Is 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
The 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.

~~~
tezza
as i said it was more lighthearted.

i wrote it at a bus stop after work in London, nothing snarky intended.

ive used bullet points A LOT in many comments over the years.

it used to be “citation needed” back in the day, so i still supply them.

~~~
dang
It sounds like I misread you - sorry about that! Moderation is pattern
matching and that means making mistakes when the pattern doesn't really match.

Unfortunately, there's a sense in which it still makes no difference because
the comment fits the flamewar-starting pattern whether you were posting in
that spirit or not. But I would have phrased my reply differently if I'd read
you more precisely.

------
newyankee
Never 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.

------
amvalo
>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-...](https://cup.columbia.edu/book/dispossession-deprivation-and-
development/9788193732915)).

~~~
sandworm101
Ya, 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.

------
wjnc
My 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
When 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
Most tax dollars in most countries are not spent on goods and services for the
benefit of the people who paid them.

~~~
pickdenis
But 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
I 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.

------
GreeniFi
This 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]

------
enitihas
British 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.

------
gumby
From 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.

------
known
Why Britain Doesn’t Owe India Reparations
[http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2015/07/29/the-
countervie...](http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2015/07/29/the-counterview-
why-britain-doesnt-owe-india-reparations/)

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-
no...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/caste-is-not-
past.html) and [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shashi-tharoor/caste-wont-
disa...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shashi-tharoor/caste-wont-disappear-
india_b_6257354.html)

And check which Caste is looting India? [https://www.quora.com/Which-caste-is-
looting-India/answer/Ad...](https://www.quora.com/Which-caste-is-looting-
India/answer/Adarsh-Sapoota)

------
deogeo
> 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.

------
t1o5
An 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)

------
rvn1045
Shashi 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
I 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.

------
c-smile
In 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.

------
known
Except 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)

------
lallysingh
> Centuries of poverty and suffering could have been prevented.

------
calebm
This makes me appreciate the American Revolution all the more.

------
kolbe
2018 morality applied to 1800's people.

------
a11r
Also, 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.

------
justaguyhere
Any idea why this article is flagged? It isn't a bad article

~~~
dang
See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18683542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18683542).

------
pm90
This article must not be flagged

------
dhbradshaw
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

------
cslarson
1 hr + 44 points + no comments = upvote manipulation

~~~
dang
No, that happens fairly often without upvote manipulation, and as far as I can
tell this post wasn't affected by such manipulation.

~~~
pm90
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

~~~
t1o5
A sizable chunk of users awake at this time of the day are descendants of the
very same colonialists. What did you expect ?

~~~
perfmode
People should be able to look at their past without knee jerk dismissal.

Let’s face it. The British haven’t always treated others nicely.

