I want to come back to this, because I was in a hurry last time.
You know, we have been discussing railroads all over this thread since the first page. For you to waltz in here pretending that nobody has mentioned railroads is poor form. If you’re going to act as if you have useful information to contribute to this thread, you could at least read it first to see what has already been discussed.
So, you studied it for a week more than 30 years ago? Did it ever occur to you that there might be additional research since then? Did it ever occur to you that the LSE 30 years ago might have had a bias on this topic? But, please, let’s here all about your thirty-year old, vaguely remembered one-week study, instead of looking at all the other cites already posted in this thread.
Wow. I analyze GDP figures that show that the UK grew faster than the India during the colonial period, and your response is simply “It’s not clear.” You don’t produce your own GDP figures, you don’t produce any data to contradict these figures. You just arbitrarily decide that GDP figures are irrelevant.
Which is what I predicted the neocolonialists would do at the beginning of this thread.
We’ve discussed Indian industrial capacity multiple times in this thread as well as the trade/tariff regime set up by the British. Again, waltzing in here acting as if nobody as discussed these topics before you showed up is poor form.
Why do you think anybody cares about your personal take? Particularly when you couldn’t take the time to even read the thread before posting?
If you care to read what I said, I don’t claim that China does not have a problem with corruption. Nor that it is better than India in this respect.
What I said was China deals with corruption very severely, when it is exposed. India, in contrast, seems not to mind so much and regularly attracts politicians with criminal backgrounds who can win votes.
If you don’t pay more attention and read what people have written, you won’t learn anything.:smack:
Blah, blah. Do you have a systematic study we can look at to see how the two countries deal with corruption? Or, are we just supposed to rely on your word for this?
If China really did deal with corruption “more severely” it would have less of a corruption problem than India. That it’s corruption seems to be on par with India’s means that from a systemic perspective, it isn’t dealing with its corruption problem any better than India is. Whatever severe penalties China may occasionally hand out, they don’t seem to be much of a deterrent for overall corruption.
ETA: I’m not going to pay attention to anecdotal evidence. We can pull up dueling cites where either country has handed out severe penalties for a specific case of corruption. That doesn’t tell us anything meaningful, though.
But no one knows what it is, still less what value it might have. I’ve seen IQ tests described as essentially tests for “secretarial skills,” and psychologists no longer agree on the existence of any general-intelligence factor g.
There are frequent reports of China executing corrupt officials.
Go on! type 'china executes corrupt officials into google and look at them.
India, in contrast, has executed very few people at all and not for corruption. Look it up.
Did it not occur to you that China, despite the severity with which uses of the death penalty in such cases, still struggles to get a grip on corruption?
You are clearly rather ignorant about this subject. You are simply not paying attention.
China is a one party State. We all know the general rules of how one party states work. All too often corruption is a euphemism for “political opponent”. From everything I read and hear corruption is systemic in both China and India. Just because one of these states kills people under the label of corruption does not mean one state takes the problem that much more seriously.
I am willing to be convinced otherwise; that China does take corruption seriously. However, the whole clusterfuck that is one party rule, an unfree press, and an untransparent political culture makes me doubt anything Chinese politicians say about internal Chinese matters.
Wow. You really don’t get how autocratic one party states work, do you? Political opponents aren’t usually shot for the crime they are actually charged with. Or do you really think those executed after the Moscow show trials were actually guilty of “conspiring with the western powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union, and restore capitalism?” All you’re doing is demonstrating further how deeply ignorant you are on this topic in general by trying to declare BrightNShiny ignorant for not knowing how corruption free China is because it regularly executes public officials under the public charge of ‘corruption’.
Sorry, what does the Soviet show trials have to do with modern day China?
They are both one party states, so the internal dynamics must be the same?
That is an absurd oversimplification.
The Soviets persecuted people for political crimes, they could not care less about the economy, which was its undoing. China cares very much about the economy and punishes economic crimes severely.
:rolleyes:Here, for the hell of it I googled ‘china executes corrupt officials’ for you. Have a read, bolding mine, enjoy:
So China cares so much about the economy and punishes economic crimes so severely that corruption is actually increasing. The comparison to the Soviet Union and show trials should have been obvious even to you; don’t take the words coming out of the communist party’s official news organs at face value.
That simply indicates that despite China’s severe measures, they have not been as successful at eliminating corruption as they would wish. However, despite this weakness, their economy is in much better shape than India, they seem to be able to grow their economy far more easily. They know the weaknesses and make an effort to try to address them.
India also has a serious problem, but it remains much more tolerant of corruption in its political class. India should exceed or be on par with China, after all it started with far better infrastructure and some robust public national institutions inherited from British rule, yet its economic performance trails miserably.
Do the GDP figures prove that if the British (and the Dutch/Portuguese/etc.) had stayed out of India, that India would have had an industrial revolution and massive GDP growth (comparable to Britain’s) in the 19th century?
If so, how?
That’s the point Measure for Measure was trying to make, and you’ve overlooked. Nothing about the GDP figures proves that India would have thrived without the British. That’s what is not clear. Parts of the world that were not under colonial rule didn’t have an industrial revolution in the 19th century: Ottoman Turkey, e.g., had railroads, but large-scale industrialization there mostly happened under Ataturk and later.
You wrote much earlier in this thread that “potential per-capita GDP should have risen at the same rate in India as the UK’s actual per-capita growth”; what’s your reasoning behind that? Even if India had entirely avoided European colonization, why “should it” have grown at the same rate as a place with an entirely different history, geography, demographics, political structure, etc.?
I’m not playing this game. You are trying to mix up different points I have made.
The British were in control of the Indian economy during the colonial period. And it stagnated. That’s what the GDP figures show. And during this period there was almost no industrialization in India. That’s just history.
And as I pointed out, it makes no economic sense to ship raw materials to Britain for manufacture, just to ship them back to India for sale. All things being equal, it should have been cheaper to manufacture in India itself. So, then you have to start asking why that didn’t happen. And at the point, we can start looking at government policy to figure out why. Because once government policy radically changed at independence, we got rapid industrialization in India. So, why during the 40+ years of BEIC rule and 90+ years of colonial rule, didn’t we get this industrialization.
Oh, but I forgot. For the neocolonialist, we must never look at government policy.
No, that’s not the point he was making. He was trying to pretend that India industrialized under the British (when it didn’t) and he was trying to pretend that the GDP figures were unclear without providing his own GDP figures.
Don’t put words in my mouth. I didn’t say anything about “thriving” without the British.
And what you don’t seem to get is that large scale industrialization in India didn’t happen under the British. It happened under Nehru. This is the thing you don’t seem to understand. Despite building railroads, the British still managed to mess up the Indian economy.
Nope, don’t put words in my mouth. I was trying to show different ways at attempting to calculate GDP trend lines, in order to calculate economic differentials. That was only one possibility I offered, and I offered two other ways to try and calculate it, and I clearly stated that I wasn’t sure if that was a workable way to calculate that. And if you had been following the freaking thread, you would know that I was responding to another poster who wanted to engage in an intellectual exercise as to how to calculate damages as if it were a liability case. I did not ever state that that “potential per-capita GDP should have risen at the same rate in India as the UK’s actual per-capita growth” as a fact, so stop distorting what I posted.
I’m not going to even bother with this. This is again another distortion of what I posted.
Lol. All you’re posts in this thread have been stupid things to say.
[QUOTEThere are frequent reports of China executing corrupt officials.[/QUOTE]
Lol. You did exactly what I predicted you would do again. You want to play dueling cites. Because you think that reading a few news articles here or there makes you more of an expert than people who actually sit down and study these things.
Here’s what I posted, in case you missed it:
[QUOTE=Me]
ETA: I’m not going to pay attention to anecdotal evidence. We can pull up dueling cites where either country has handed out severe penalties for a specific case of corruption. That doesn’t tell us anything meaningful, though.
[/QUOTE]
And now you want to play the anecdotal evidence game, just like I said you would. Anyway, this is a hijack of this thread. But, I think Dissonance has more than answered your silliness on yet another topic.
Oh, one more thing, slash2k, here’s a point I made on the first page of this thread, and then re-posted again in this thread:
[QUOTE=Me]
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).
[/QUOTE]
Then you come in with this:
[QUOTE=slash2k]
Do the GDP figures prove that if the British (and the Dutch/Portuguese/etc.) had stayed out of India, that India would have had an industrial revolution and massive GDP growth (comparable to Britain’s) in the 19th century?
[/QUOTE]
So, I say that the colonial period probably sped up the transfer of technology worldwide by a few hundred years, and then you waltz in to pretend that I claimed India would have had an industrial revolution in the 19th Century. I never made that claim, although it’s certainly a possibility that without British meddling, and industrial revolution would have happened. What we know is that with British meddling, no industrial revolution happened.
But if someone wants to claim that railroads were some great thing that were handed to India by the British, then that’s a pretty easy claim to deal with. I can point to the Ottomans and say that railroads were spreading anyway, and would have happened eventually in India with or without the British.
But even my saying that railroads would have happened anyway in India without the British is not a statement that India would have had “an industrial revolution in the 19th century.” You are just making up words and putting them in my mouth, and if you keep doing that, my only response to you from here on out will be “read the freaking thread.”
I did answer the original question. I’ve answered it over and over again. You just don’t like the answer. You are also ignorant about basic facts on the topic. You make assertions (many of them laughable) while ignoring other people’s cites. I can’t help it if you want to keep pretending you actually know something about the topic at hand, when it’s been shown over and over to you again that you don’t.
You know what’s really funny about this topic? If the neocolonialist actually wanted to present a coherent rebuttal to me, they’re all on wikipedia. You just have to wade through a few related articles to find them and then read them.
Of course, I have the counter-rebuttals to them ready. But it’s telling that nobody in this thread actually managed to even bring up those rebuttals. As I said, neocolonialists care very, very much about this topic, but not actually enough to learn about it.
Anyway, I have to go back to work now. But if the rest of this thread is just going to be a bunch of people misrepresenting what I said, or dismissing cites or making up their own facts, well, I guess there’s not much I can do to convince people who think that’s proper debating technique.
Japan and to some extent the Japanese colony of Korea successfully industrialized without European colonization, so it was at least possible. Not necessarily likely.
Yes, we understand that. The question is whether the Indian economy stagnated BECAUSE of the British, or DESPITE the British, or for reasons that had nothing at all to do with the British.
But all things were not equal. Geography, demographics, cultural traditions, history, local politics, educational levels, climate, and other factors besides merely British government policy play into this. What is the relative importance of each?
Was government policy the ONLY thing that changed between India ca. 1820 and India in the 1950s? I don’t think so. In particular, the breakdown of very traditional feudal structures in society is closely associated with rapid economic changes (often but not always for the better). In Britain, for example, late medieval depopulation such as the Black Death led to political pressures that ended the feudal regime and set the stage for the Industrial Revolution. In India, though, the traditional caste-based systems and the power/position of the local elites were largely preserved and in some/many cases enhanced by the Brits. In the interwar period, however, the British Raj started moving to relax those rules, and began policies of reserving a percentage of government jobs, electoral seats, university places, etc., for members of lower castes, and post-independence India accelerated these trends. Social policy and the decline of feudalism may have as much to do with economic growth as any formal economic policy.
Nonsense. However, I think you are looking at government policy in a vacuum, as though nothing else affected the economy besides the government, and that is as naive as ignoring the role of government altogether.
No, he specifically stated that what was not clear was the impact of colonialism on India. You are the one trying to make his statement into something else.
I quoted you directly.
I understand that perfectly well. I also understand that the kind of industrialization that happened under Nehru would have been anathema to Britain, even as applied to British soil, during most of the colonial era. The nationalization and centralized planning that Nehru brought to India was entirely unlike British economic policy IN BRITAIN until
about the same time period, and Britain never had anything like the “License Raj” that developed in the 1950s and 60s. Britain didn’t industrialize because the British government established and owned/controlled all of the railroads and factories and airlines and hospitals and shipping, and it didn’t happen because the British government licensed every business and every kind of economic activity. Nehru started down a different path.
Nehru decided it was the government’s job to force industrialization and urbanization (mostly by shoving money at the task). India did not industrialize along the typical capitalist model that Britain, the U.S., France, etc., did, and it industrialized following a model that would have been impossible given the state of political and economic thought in the 19th century.
That’s the point we disagree upon. I don’t see clear evidence that the British “messed up” the Indian economy. We agree that Britain didn’t do all that much to aid the Indian economy, but did British policy actually retard Indian economic development, or would India have sputtered along as a predominantly agrarian and unindustrialized economy absent the Brits, given the political and social conditions prevailing before the BEIC ever set sail? Thus far, you have not given any serious attention to this question, instead dismissing it (and the people asking it) as though the question itself is beneath you. However, it is central to your thesis.
I’ve been following the freaking thread, thank you very much, and perhaps have been following it more closely than you have. The “intellectual exercise” is a perfectly reasonable approach: if little or no damages exist, then the British didn’t really mess up the economy in the first place. The burden is on those who claim the Raj messed up to prove how and to what extent, which is what damages are all about.
If there’s no reason to believe that potential per-capita GDP “should have risen” at some predetermined rate (whether British actual rate, post-independence rate, whatever), then potential per-capita GDP is essentially irrelevant to the discussion, in which case your repeated emphasis on GDP is likewise irrelevant. You keep returning to the theme of “Indian GDP didn’t rise like it should have” and have excoriated other posters for not producing their own GDP figures; what, exactly, are you trying to prove using GDP?
We all understand that Indian GDP didn’t rise very much during the Raj, and has exploded since independence. What, exactly, do you think that proves? What is your thesis as the meaning of the GDP figures? So far, what I am understanding your thesis to be is “GDP figures prove the Brits messed up the economy,” and nothing you’ve presented actually proves that because of a lack of an alternative: what would have happened without the Brits? You now say you are not arguing that Indian GDP would have followed British trendlines; do you have any evidence to show it would not have followed for example Turkish trendlines and sputtered?
Oh, man. There is just so much wrong in your post, slash2k. Here we go…
[QUOTE=slash2k]
Yes, we understand that. The question is whether the Indian economy stagnated BECAUSE of the British, or DESPITE the British, or for reasons that had nothing at all to do with the British.
[/QUOTE]
No, that is not the original question posed in the OP. That is a question that has been introduced into the thread. What you and Measure for Measure have attempted to do is to take my responses to other questions and try to pin them on this question. I’m not playing that game. You are distorting what I posted.
OMFG. I know full well all things were not equal. I’ve been pointing that all things were not equal since the beginning of the thread. I’ve been pointing to unequal government policies since the beginning of the thread. The phrase “all things being equal” means “if all things were equal.” It does not mean that things were actual equal.
Now, I want to take a step back here. Because I have reams of economic evidence that show that in general, government policy affects the economy. This is why when we analyze something like the Great Depression, economists look at things like monetary policy or industrial policy or fiscal policy or regulatory policy (or lack thereof). Because that’s our starting place in doing economic analysis.
The neocolonialists want to skip all of that. They either want to (falsely) claim that the Indian economy performed better under the British than under the Indians, or they want to just skip the regulatory analysis completely and point to non-governmental factors.
Now, there are certain things which can severely impact an economy which are caused by non-governmental factors (like an exogenous shock). But if someone wants to claim something like that, that’s an extraordinary claim. And it’s up to them to provide evidence that these non-governmental factors were indeed so signficant. They’re the ones who need to do the regression analysis. Because I can point to 4 different periods of Indian history (BEIC period, Raj, License Raj and post-1991) and show that rapidly improving growth rates followed radical changes in government policy.
When you bring up something like geography or climate, it’s pretty clear that you’ve lost the plot. There was no significant change in geography in 1818 or 1858 or 1950 or 1991. So how exactly did geography factor into the growth rate? There was no significant change in climate in 1818 or 1858 or 1950 or 1991. So, how is climate supposed to figure into the growth rate? If you want to claim something like geography or climate, then it’s on you to do the regression analysis to eliminate government policy. Because I have changes in growth rate following changes in government policy and you don’t have any changes in geography or climate.
So, you’re asking me what the relative importance of geography is? No. That’s not my question to answer, since the geography didn’t change. You need to answer how this non-changing geography had such disparate impacts on growth rates in 1818, 1858, 1950 and 1991.
The radical breakdown in the feudal structure in India happens after independence.
This is racist nonsense which attempts to disappear Indians from the reform of the caste system. The Indians are the one who reformed it. So, the Indians finally start reforming the caste system (and yes, some reforms happened during the Raj), and your contention is that the British Raj caused this change? When the Raj hadn’t done anything to change it before? I don’t think so. Indians pushing for reform of the caste system isn’t some chalk mark on the British side of the ledger, it’s a chalk mark on the Indian and anti-colonial side of the ledger.
Nope. Read the freaking thread.
I listed GDP figures for both the British and Indian growth rates at various important dates. And then I said it was “clear” that the Indian economy grew slower than the British economy during the colonial period. That is the only thing I said was “clear.” Measure for Measure then tried to twist that into some broader statement which I didn’t make.
And then I said that economists calculate potential GDP. And I showed one method for calculating potential GDP which I also stated probably didn’t apply to this topic. And then I gave three scenarios for using that method, and then stated again that these might not be applicable here. And then you** decided to pretend that I had made a claim that potential GDP in the absence of the British would have risen at the same rate as England’s during the colonial period. That is not a claim I made, nor is it a claim I would make. That is something you just flat-out made up.
Doesn’t matter if you quote me directly if you decide to respond to something I didn’t actually say.
Well, Measure for Measure certainly didn’t understand that, since he tried to claim that India industrialized in 1870. But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here.
This is irrelevant to any of the points I have made. People in this thread keep trying to pretend that Indian industrialized prior to independence. Or they try to pretend that economic growth rates under the License Raj were worse than under the British Raj. Or they try to pretend that the British were a necessary component for Indian industrialization, when they didn’t even help with industrialization during the colonial period. Or they try to pretend that technology wouldn’t have found it’s way to India eventually in the absence of the British, when technology was always finding it’s way to India eventually.
Oh, gee, thanks. There’s actually a post where I point out why Nehru chose the path he did, so I don’t need you informing me that Nehru started down a different path. Read the freaking thread.
Oh, wow. Thanks for the lecture. Did you see the post where I called it “Soviet-lite”? I know full-well what path Nehru followed. Read the freaking thread.
Irrelevant. There were models for industrialization and industrial policy available–Britain was using one. The British didn’t see fit to try their own industrialization model in India. That’s the problem.
No, I don’t have to play alternate history timeline when doing economics. I don’t have to ask whether the Great Depression would have happened in the US if there hadn’t been a US. That’s nonsensical. I don’t have to ask whether the Greek crisis would have happened if there wasn’t an EU. For all we know, in whatever mythical entity that replaced the US, there might have been a Great Depression. And for all we know, the Greeks might have found themselves up shit creek even without an EU. But that doesn’t change the fact that there was a United States which had certain government policies, or that there is an EU that had certain government policies. And I don’t have to create some alternate history timeline to show that the policies were bad. I just have to point to basic macroeconomics.
Nope, don’t post-shift here. Admit you were misrepresenting my statement in that post, and then I’ll decide if I want to address this new point.
This is not what I said, and you are again flat-out making stuff up. I never said that potential per-capita GDP shouldn’t have risen, I said that I wasn’t sure if that particular method I posited was the way to calculate it. Stop making stuff up. Read the freaking thread.
What utter nonsense.
If you don’t know how GDP relates to measuring economic performance, then you’re too ignorant to be lecturing anyone about economics.