And what angered me about Tharoor’s statement about British aid to India was that it was worthless. Even if he was right about everything else, to denigrate aid to your own country to help the poorest in Indian society is the height of arrogant posturing.
Just who are those posters?** Me, Little Nemo**?
Ansfor Tharoor, the guy is in one controversy after another ever since he became an MP. He cannot open his mouth without putting his foot into it.
[QUOTE=Hector_St-Clare]
I think there were some important cultural and social advances the British brought to India, but on the level of economics, they horribly mismanaged the economy. The rate of growth under the British was nearly stagnant.
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Well…
- Syphilis
- Railroads
- Telegraph
And?
I don’t see that Little Nemo defended colonial practices. He made a sarcastic comment. As for you, I asked you for further explanation about Tharoor, which you provided.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. Yes, the colonial period resulted in a widespread technology transfer worldwide, which would have probably taken a few hundred years longer in the absence of the colonial period. But, a number of countries which weren’t colonies still managed to build railroads and telegraphs during this period (although, it’s easier to glom onto the idea of a railroad if the country/colony next door has railroads).
But if we’re talking about how British colonial policy impacted the Indian economy, it’s pretty clear that it was disastrous for it. Even despite the introduction of the railroad and telegraph to India, the British still managed to ruin the economy. – ETA: On reread, I guess I misinterpreted your tone? Maybe we’re in agreement on this? I can’t tell.
ETA: I have to go to my friends’ 25th wedding anniversary party, so not sure when I’ll be back on the boards.
In case you did not get the reference, when in the interwar period the British government wast touting the benefits of colonialism, the popular retort was “railroads and syphilis” . I added Telegraph as that was the other S Continent wide thing.
I agree that most non subcontinental dopers here (**Little Nemo, Malthus Tamerlane **are the exceptions) know sweet fuck all about the area, the era outside of popular imagination.
However, I think that while the overall impact was very negative, some areas did well. Punjab for instance. Bengal suffered tremendously. The coastal areas gained as well.
Its something which has to be discussed on a case by case basis
I think BnS is upset with me because I’m more interested in how much the UK would owe India and how one would calculate it than I am in whether UK owes them anything.
The first question is interesting because it’s difficult. The second is boring because it isn’t. It’s painfully obvious that the British took advantage of India. Of course they should be compensated - that’s not a great debate; it’s not even a good one.
But how much, and how to figure it out? That’s interesting, and it’s how I interpreted the OP when it raised the question of whose numbers were accurate.
I guess that to answer the question, one would have to examine the balance of trade that existed between the UK and India. india exported cotton, tea, rubber, rice, and other raw materials. India imported British made machinery, railroad engines, and other manufactured goods. Did India wind up sending specie (gold/silver) to British banks? Somehow, india amassed a ton of silver and gold-so i would say that there must have been a fairly even balance of trade.
You are mixing up Afghanistan, Burma, Tibet and Wazistan which adjacent to India with other campaigns. India has always been under threat from expansionist powers to the North. It still is!
Perhaps you might like to take a stab at what might have happened if the Nazis or (more likely) the Japanese had defeated the British and had taken over India during WW2?
Of course there was no India at the start.
Given events elsewhere during this period, quite how hundreds of thousands of Indians didn’t end up enslaved and picking cotton in a strange and alien land I don’t know.
By the time the British were the dominant force in the subcontinent, slavery was out of fashion. The Brits didn’t conquer most of India till 1818, at which time the slave trade was already illegal. They did make heavy use of (non-enslaved) Indian agricultural labourers in Sri Lanka, Guyana, Fiji, Trinidad, Mauritius and Malaysia though, which is why those countries still have large ethnically Indian populations today.
Okay, I guess I did misinterpret you. But, I don’t think you’re analyzing the “but-for” test correctly. It’s a causation test. If I run a red light and hit your car, we don’t do this alternate timeline thing to calculate damages (at least, generally in US law). We wouldn’t start asking if your car would have been damaged somehow by somebody else in the future if I hadn’t hit you.
As for calculating actual damages, when we’re talking about a car, that’s easy to do. But when we’re talking about something like a whole economy, well, there’s just a number of ways to measure economic performance. We can definitely say that economy A is worse than economy B, but calculating how much worse is going to be a big debate.
Do you know the INC’s position on WWII? Do you know what the INA is? Do you know who Bose is? Do you know what logistical train capabilities either the Nazis or the Japanese had at the time? Why don’t you go read a few Wiki articles, and then come back and tell us whether the Japanese or Germans would have actually wanted to take over India during WW2 after kicking out the British (I’ll give you a hint: they probably wouldn’t have).
Duh, I should have gotten the reference. I had a brain fart.
But the thing is, there are always winners or losers in an economy, no matter how shitty it’s run. I tend to approach things from a macroeconomic level, and on that level, it’s pretty clear that the British management of the Indian economy was pretty bad.
This is just a general comment, but it’s something that I was mulling over. In these colonial threads, we always get people who refuse to look at actual colonial policies when discussing economic performance. We have a bunch of threads going on right now about the Greek crisis, and people have blamed Greek government policy or argued that other government policies have contributed as well, but I haven’t seen anybody actually claim that government policy is wholly irrelevant. And no matter what the topic is, whether it’s the depression or climate change or that thread about Versailles that’s on the front page now, the examination is always about how government policy does or does not affect the economy.
But, somehow, when it comes to colonialism, a bunch of people rush in to… well, they’re in effect claiming that government policy is irrelevant to economic performance. Why aren’t they in the other threads claiming this? Why aren’t they in one of the Greek threads claiming that the Greek crisis has nothing to do with Greek government policy (or ECB policy or EU policy)?
Because no matter what metric you want to use, the Indian economy sucked at independence. There’s just no way around that. And the British were in charge of the Indian economy before independence. There’s no way around that either. So, if it’s not government policy that caused the suckage, then what was it?
Ahhh… no. You are mixing up the fact that Britain used Indian troops in its colonial conquests with the bizarre notion that Britain protected India from its enemies. Or perhaps you could explain what threat Sudan, South Africa, Egypt or other such places posed to India? Or to cut much more squarely to the point, how was Britain using Indian troops to conduct colonial conquests for itself Britain providing protection for India?
You might want to consider dropping the colonial arrogance and consider that the 2.5 million Indian volunteers not only kept Japan from taking India from Britain, they also kept the Germans and Italians from driving the British out of North Africa, conquered Italian East Africa, put down the Iraqi Revolt, conquered Vichy French Syria, provided the 3rd largest army in the Italian Campaign, and in fact was the largest volunteer army in history at the time. You might want to show the slightest modicum of gratitude for them voluntarily doing so much to save your bacon in WWII, and as BrightNShiny suggested you might want to look up on Japan’s logistical abilities when it came to invading India in WWII. I’ll give you the short version: when they tried they starved to death because they couldn’t even move enough food forward, see Operation U-Go:
You might want to consider the order of battle of Commonwealth forces at Imphal
and Kohima[ul]
[li]50th Indian Parachute Brigade[/li][li]161st Indian Brigade[/li][li]5th Indian Infantry Division[/li][li]British 2nd Division[/li][/ul]When you flippantly ask what would have happened if the Japanese had defeated the British and conquered India considering that the vast majority of the Commonwealth troops were Indian.
While you’re at it, you might want to meditate on what existential threat Kaiser Wilhelm posed to India when India provided the British with one million soldiers in WWI.
I agree. I’m not going to completely condemn the British rule over India. But its economic policy was wrong. Britain pretty much prohibited India from industrializing. And this was during the same period when Britain was industrializing. So Britain realized the economic advantages of industrial development and denied them to India - solely so that Britain would benefit from India’s disadvantage.
I know exactly who Bose is: one of the leaders of Indian Independence who solicited both Hitler and the Japanese and raised an Indian armies fighting first with the Nazis and then with the Japanese against the British.
He is still revered in India, it is quite common to see pictures of him meeting those leaders. There is still a deep ignorance in India of the character of the Nazi and Japanese regimes and their consequences. An enemies enemy is my friend. Bose took this notion to remarkable lengths, trying to get support from Hitler, the Japanese and even Stalin to raise armies against the British.
What would the Japanese have done if they had reached India after fighting all the way up Burma? Said, oh this territory is too big for us, then turned and left? The Japanese wanted to capture resources like oil and rubber for their war industries and to block the supply lines to the Chinese. If they had reached India, they would have probably installed a puppet head of state like Bose, so long as he was useful to them.
Dealing with external threats to India was an important part of the British strategy. If that protection had not existed, India would have not existed as a nation. It would have been long since divided up between competing world powers.
If British is accused of draining the economy, the economic policies of post independence India did little to promote growth.
Gandhi promoted an idea of economics that rejected industrialisation in preference to self sufficient peasant economy.
Indian politicians were far too often influenced by the left and admired Soviet style centrally planned economic policy.
The result has been similar: a stagnant economy.
Tnanks for the interesting discussion.
I post just to call attention to a website with impressive graphs. I’ve marked India and U.K. on the graph, as well as Russia as proxy for a large uncolonised country. Click Play and watch India stagnate for 15 decades while U.K. and, eventually, Russia take off with improving GDP and life expectancy.
India’s sudden burst in life expectancy and personal purchasing power begins exactly with the end of the British Raj in 1948.
It’s all good.
I have a law degree 
and although it’s been about a decade, I remember how torts work. But like you said before, this isn’t a tort and there really isn’t any standard you could apply - the UN has issued some guidelines, but they’re pretty vague and haven’t been used to my knowledge.
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/RemedyAndReparation.aspx
That statement makes reference to returning the victim to pre-violation status, but that obviously doesn’t work in this situation. It also makes reference to lost opportunities, which I think begs the questions of how it would be defined. That, I think, would necessitate the question of how the opportunities would be measured. That isn’t to say that I think one would have to calculate how India would have fared under the French or Dutch, but that one would have to ask whether the calculation was appropriate, and offer and offer a reason why or why not.
Bolding mine.
So how do you eliminate other concurrent factors such as technical improvements in agriculture, insecticides, the spread of antibiotic treatments and so on? How do you deal with the huge casualties that arose during Partition? Include that as part of the Raj and the peace that followed as part of Independence?
Nice diagram, not sure it proves much one way or the other.
:dubious:
Asked and answered; try reading post 54. There is no “what would have happened if the Japanese reached India after fighting all the way up Burma;” they did reach India after fighting all the way up Burma where they happened to be stopped by the Commonwealth composed primarily of Indian soldiers. At the same time that India had provided the British with enough soldiers to among other things, keep Rommel and the Italians from driving the British out of North Africa, put down the Iraqi Revolt, occupy Iran, conquer Italian East Africa, Vichy French Syria and Lebanon, and on their own Indians comprised the 3rd largest army in the Italian Campaign after the US and Britain. It would do you well to stop nattering on about Britain protecting India and dealing with external threats to India being an important part of its strategy when the actual facts speak entirely to the contrary; India was a source of manpower for Britain in dealing with external threats to itself and in its colonial conquests. Since you seem to have missed it the first two times; India provided 2.5 million volunteer soldiers for the Allies in WWII. Bose and the INA aren’t much more than an historical footnote, comprising 40,000 members on paper. One may as well look at the British Free Corps for evidence that England would have thrown in with the Nazis if given a chance.
I’m still waiting to hear what threat Kaiser Wilhelm posed to India when India provided a million soldiers for that world war.