Did the British really 'drain' Wealth from India?

Great Debates
61

The threat that Germany posed was to the trade routes to India of the British Empire that starts in the North Sea, where the major confrontations took place, and extends down to the Mediterranean and through Suez to India.

As I am perfectly sure you are aware, the threat by land to India was always the Russian expansionism through the Afghanistan and the North West Frontier.

I am also pretty sure you are aware that the hold the British had on India was in large part at the consent of political interests within India who saw the advantage of being part of a global Empire. It was either the British or some other imperial power, at a time when Empires where very much in fashion. The British kept other powers out of India and consolidated it as a nation, unifying the country with the railway system and introducing national institutions like an army and a civil service. Inevitably that held the seeds of its own demise. Jinnah, Gandhi, Nehru, Bose and all of those revered names of Indian Independence were from an elite educated in the UK, required to run a civil administration. They were all rather better at being lawyers than statesmen.

At most, a couple of thousand British, managed to control a subcontinent of hundreds of millions? How, if not by balancing the concerns of an imperial project, with local political interests. It sometimes went wrong, nonetheless it was a relationship that lasted a considerable time and stabilised a volatile territory.

However, if you would like to reduce the British involvement in India to a simple case of colonial exploitation. Fine, that is the standard position of chippy Indian nationalists and their struggle to find some unifying national identity. However, such a simplification hardly does them any credit. If it was so bad, why did it last?

It has more than a touch of ‘What did the Romans ever do for us?’ about it.

In the 68 years since Independence, Indian politicians have proved themselves to be far more adept at draining the wealth of India into their own pockets than the British ever did. They have mismanaged the economy and seen economic growth eclipsed by the better organised Chinese who are growing in influence.

Shashi Tharoor is a politician setting out his stall in Indian politics and the simplistic ‘it was all the Britishers fault’ sentiments are part of that.

62

So? It’s not like the British were some saints in all of this. We haven’t even gotten to all the nasty things they did while they were ruling. Not much difference between a Stalin-induced famine or a British one. People still die from hunger either way.

Yes, that’s exactly what they would have done. As has been pointed out to you multiple times by Dissonance, they did not have the logistical train to occupy India. And why would they want to? The INC was proclaiming neutrality and Bose was popular in India. An independent India would have been neutral and trading with them, and depending on how much influence Bose might have had, they may have even gotten a nice deal out of it.

On the other hand, occupying India would have been nothing but a complete disaster for them. The Indians were on the verge of kicking out the British and would have turned those efforts on the Japanese. The Indians had figured out how to deny the British tax revenue. And there was all sorts of communal violence.

Had they occupied the country, it would have erupted into chaos. All they would have gotten for their efforts was a lot of dead soldiers and very little raw materials.

India was not an important source of oil at this time. I’m not sure how valuable dye and jute crops would have been to the Japanese, but I doubt it would be worth the effort to occupy India.

Says who? You? Anything is possible when playing alternate history timelines.

Lol. I knew someone like you would show up with this. It’s so freaking predictable.

So? Nehru chose to industrialize.

Uh, no. Nehru was completely correct when he decided that the Indian economy had to rapidly industrialize. And at the time, there were only a few models for rapid industrialization, and one of those was the Soviets (the other big one is probably the Japanese). As I have pointed out in this thread already, within decades after independence, the Indians had built a heavy industry capability virtually from scratch. In hindsight, it’s easy to say that a more market oriented approach would have been better, but given the economic knowledge available at the time, it’s not actually that suprising that he went after a Soviet model. Particularly when you consider that the British form of “capitalism” had been devastating to the subcontinent.

But, let’s take this back to the beginning. So far in this thread, you’ve made it clear that you don’t actually know how long the British were in India. You’ve made it clear that you don’t actually know what was going on in the subcontinent when the British were colonizing it (which is clear by your bringing up the Mughals instead of the Marathas). It’s very clear you are bone-dead ignorant about the Indian colonial period. You could actually try reading some of the posts in this thread before you spout the same nonsense over and over.

63

Oh, if only this issue of technological advancement had been addressed in the thread already. Wait, it already has.

The same way you would deal with the huge casualties during the British rule itself, such as during the 1876 Great Famine (approx. 10 million dead) or the 1943 Bengal Famine (approx. 3 million dead) or the 1769 Great Bengal Famine (approx 10 million dead) – do I have to keep listing these?

Lol. So predictable again – and exactly what I said the colonial defenders would do. For the colonial defenders, things like GDP comparisons are irrelevant. For the rest of us in the real world, GDP is a useful measure of economic performance.

64

By that do you mean people who actually know how to read a history book? I’m sure the “chippy” nationalists know how long the British were actually in India, which is something you don’t.

Your entire post is nonsense, as usual.

65

I’ll assume this is supposed to be a response to me asking what threat Kaiser Wilhelm posed to India when India provided one million soldiers to the British in WWI, but it is so nonsensical that its a non sequitur. You’ve answered what threat Germany posed to the British Empire’s trade routes, not what threat Germany posed to India. The answer, of course, is none, yet India sent a million men to fight for the British Empire in that world war.

You really have no idea how much you are shooting yourself in the foot claiming the threat by land to India was always the Russians and that India somehow enjoyed Britain’s blessed protection during the years it was a colony. You might recall that Britain and Russia were on the same side in WWI. Oddly, I don’t seem to recall Britain ever sending a million men to defend India from its enemies, or even a tenth of that number. Yet in both world wars when Britain found itself in danger, it looked to India for aid in its own protection. Britain was hardly alone in doing this; the French did it as well as did all colonial powers involved in the world wars. This was actually a very large factor in eroding the colonial system; it becomes hard to impress upon your colonial subjects how superior you are as a people and as a system when you have to arm them by the hundreds of thousands and bring them to Europe to fight your wars.

66

The funny thing though, is that while the British wrecked the Indian economy, they didn’t really do so by “draining” wealth from India. A few businessmen in Britain benefited from the economic policies of the Empire, but Britain as a whole did not. The Empire was not a system for stealing a cupful of rice from every Indian peasant so the British back home could enjoy a higher standard of living. The policies that were such a disaster for India didn’t actually benefit Britain that much, the British economy for instance didn’t crash into a depression on the ending of British rule of India.

British mismanagement of India might not have been exactly the same as the Mongol Hordes looting China, but it was pretty horrible.

67

Economists do calculate potential GDP, and the quick and easy way to do that is to look at the GDP growth trend line over a certain period and compare it to other periods. That sort of makes sense when we’re trying to project what GDP should have been in the future, but I’m not sure if it’s appropriate here.

But if we look at the chart provided by septimus we can glean a few things. Here are the per-capita GDP numbers for pivotal years for India and the UK. I don’t know how to do tables, so the first number is the Indian one and the second is the UK one.

1818: 725 2,916
1857: 724 4,571
1947: 839 10,100
1950: 841 10,860
1991: 1,771 25,540
2012: 5,198 36,900

I think it’s pretty clear that the UK experiences much faster growth than India during the colonial period, and we could say that potential per-capita GDP should have risen at the same rate in India as the UK’s actual per-capita growth, which would give us a baseline calculation.

Or, another way would be to look at the Indian growth rate between independence and now (or maybe between 1991 and now) and use that growth rate to calculate our potential per-capita GDP starting from 1818.

But, the population explodes post-independence, partly because of increased life expectancy, so the post-independence per-capita trend lines might not be ideal to use here.

68

In looking over those numbers, I think they show how dumb it is for the neo-colonialists to point to post-independence Indian economic policies. No matter how shitty you think post-independence management of the economy was (and as I’ve stated before, I’m not a fan), they still managed to outperform economic growth rates during the colonial period. Think about how shitty that makes British colonial economic policy in India. It was outperformed by Soviet-lite central planning.

69

Just how much faith can anyone put in estimates of measures like GDP of all the countries on the graph over the past couple of hundred years? On what basis are the calculated? How accurate can are they?

Are you going to go through it identifying all causes of the little fluctuations and bouncing around of these bubbles?

Just because it is an animated diagram does not lend it any great truth, it poses more questions than it provides answers.

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

70

Lol. There’s a tab on the website which lists all the places they are pulling data from, and you can follow all those data sources back to the original organizations. I think the World Bank knows far more about how to calculate this stuff then you do.

The cause of the economic performance under British rule were the British, since they were the ones in control of the economy. You clearly just want to spout nonsense (like the British were in India for “several hundred years”) rather than learning something.

Oh, it’s got lots of answers. But I think we can add economics to the list of topics you seem to have no knowledge of (in addition to history and military logistics).

Are you talking about your posts here? Let’s just remember. You don’t even know basic facts about the colonial period. Why do you think you have anything useful to add to this discussion?

I mean, if I were to sit here and list all of the erroneous stuff posted in this thread by you, I’d fill up an entire page. You have no idea what you are talking about and you don’t even understand basic history or economics. You don’t even know how to follow sources down on the internet. If you are this incurious about colonial history, why is it so important for you to defend it?

On any metric you want to choose (per-capita GDP, life expectancy, literacy rates), the Indians far outperform the British colonial period. It’s too bad the facts are inconvenient for your propaganda.

71

As I am sure you are aware, Russian expansionism was a dominant theme through the 19th century. Afghanistan and the North West Frontier was the key to India, and the British fought many wars there, as indeed did the Russians. I am trying to look at the bigger picture here. You seem to be hung up on WW1.

I think you need to consider how people thought of themselves under the days of Empire. Being a part of an Empire was itself an attractive ideal. The Empire was a global enterprise, in competition with other empires was a part of the political vernacular.

The idea of nationalism, came rather late, a product of the twentieth century for India.

I guess part of forming that national identity is to reject completely everything that went before, associated with foreign influence. Create a national myth. Indian nationalism seems to have it that everything associated with British was bad and it was a one sided, exploitative relationship.

Revising history to suit current political prejudice is a very bad habit.

You will learn nothing from it.

72

Lol. All you have done in this thread is revise history, like with your claim that the British were in India for “several hundred years.” Just remember, you don’t even know basic facts about the colonial period.

But, let’s take a look at another one of your nonsense claims:

[QUOTE=you]
The result has been similar: a stagnant economy.
[/QUOTE]

It’s not that hard to look up post-indpendence GDP figures for India. And if you had even bothered to do that, you’d know that the Indian economy hasn’t been stagnant. It’s been anything but stagnant. But you are so attached to being ignorant about this topic, that you couldn’t be bothered to look up Indian GDP stats before posting this nonsense.

73

I am including the time of the establishment of the British East India company trading posts and forts, which go back to 1647.

So that is 400 years.

74

The company created trading posts in Surat (where a factory was built in 1612), Madras (1639), Bombay (1668), and Calcutta (1690). By 1647, the company had 23 factories, each under the command of a factor or master merchant and governor if so chosen, and had 90 employees in India. The major factories became the walled forts of Fort William in Bengal, Fort St George in Madras, and the Bombay Castle.

75

Hard to say as an absolute, but probably getting more accurate all the time. Here is a 2013 update on some of the latest research by colleagues of the aforementioned Angus Maddison.

Gospel truth? Probably not - you can probably get arguments about the absolute accuracy of last year’s GDP. Dismissible as statistical noise? Not IMHO. There has been a great deal of academic research done is this area by folks like Maddison and the late Paul Bairoch ( whose per capita GDP estimates were actually far more favorable to pre-modern economic colossuses like India and China than Maddison’s ). This is not ( usually ) just wild speculation with numbers plucked out of someone’s ass. The argument that Britain negatively impacted India economically is to me pretty much a given. Whether you can leap from there to reparations many decades after the fact is a different debate of course. As with BrightNShiny I don’t know if you could even calculate such a thing and I doubt that it would be a non-silly ( i.e. so large as to be beyond any government ) number if you did.

But at any rate if you want to talk about the legacy of British colonialism you could point to one potential and arguable positive - unification. The Indian subcontinent is a geographic expression, not an ethnic or cultural one. Left to their own devices I’m not at all certain that any one native polity would have succeeded in pulling that entire region under a single government. The Maratha “Pentarchy” as it ultimately developed was unstable ( with towards the very end the Sindhia tail virtually wagging the dog ) and it was the largest and probably best-positioned to strive for subcontinental dominance. Everyone else, even the comparatively better-organized Sikh state in the Punjab, had even bigger obstacles to overcome. Granted we are looking at a distorted lens because all of the above polities evolved in concert with centuries of European influence and interference. Still, my best guess is you would have seen a few largish states at best, a number of mid-sized ones at worst.

Was unification a positive? I’m inclined to think so, but then I am on record as being pro-large multi-ethnic states and anti-ethnic/religious nationalism. Was it worth it? Well trying to make that argument is a bit like trying to argue modern African-Americans are better off because their ancestors were slaves - a non-starter. Of course it wasn’t worth it because we know the damage colonialism did ( a whole hell of a lot ) and we can’t know how a non-colonized India would have turned out. I can’t even be certain about the unification angle, though I think it is a reasonable guess.

ETA:

Revising history is a part of why we have historians. Not revising history when new information comes along is the opposite of good history.

76

Still isn’t “several hundred.” But, let me quote my original response to this siliness – because I think it’s clear at this point that you’re not actually reading this thread.

[QUOTE=me in post #35]
I can’t even with this. The Indians were not under the protection of the British government for “several hundred years.” Even if you throw in the BEIC period, you still don’t get to “several hundred years.” You don’t even know how long the British colonial period lasted, so why would anyone pay any attention to anything you have to say on this topic?
[/QUOTE]

See? I already preemptively answered your response.

77

Yes, I’m well aware of the history of the BEIC. It’s also pretty clear that you only just decided to go do some actual research, because you got busted. But, hey, I guess some research is an actual start. Maybe we should consider that progress for you.

Still doesn’t make your original claim valid.

78

Well I was referring to British involvement in India and that did last several hundred years.

If you were referring to British control of India. The British never did control ALL of India, even in 1948 the half of it was still ruled by the Princely states.

Of course, you knew that and you knew what I meant.

So what does that make you?

79

I don’t know about that. If Britain had been acting in India’s best interests, it would have encouraged industrialization in India. As I noted, the British were certainly aware of the benefits and we’re industrializing in Britain.

But by discouraging Indian industrialization and requiring India to give preference to British sellers, Britain was able to have a monopoly over a huge market. It’s true it wasn’t looting and pillaging; Indian consumers were buying British industrial products. But those Indian consumers would have benefited if they had been given the option of buying industrial goods from America, Germany, France, and other countries. And they would have benefited even more if they had the option of building their own factories in India and gained from both the buying and the selling of these products.

It may be true that the money that flowed from India to Britain was not shared equitably in Britain. British factory owners got a bigger profit from the sales than British factory workers did. But at least in Britain, the factory owners had to answer to a political system in which the factory workers were represented. Indians, on the other hand, didn’t have any seats in Parliament.

80

Nope. It doesn’t even come close to “several hundred years.” You’re just making yourself look more and more silly.

The British controlled trade, communications and foreign relations for the princely states, which means that they had a significant impact on the economy of the princely states.

It makes me someone who knows how to pick up a history book.