It shows that the British economy was much worse than the post-independence economy (which if you had read the freaking thread, you would see that posters have tried to pretend that this is not the case). Combine that with the immense poverty, the routine mishandling (or intentional malhandling) of famine policy, the lack of industrialization and their currency policy, it shows that the British Raj economy was terrible.
So, when the economic crash happened in 2008, did you go around claiming that we probably weren’t in a recession because the GDP figures don’t mean anything? We use GDP as a measure of economic performance. When I point to bad GDP figures, I am pointing out that the economic performance was bad. Did you ask what would have happened in 2008 if there had been no United States?
This is playing alternate history timeline. Of course anything is possible in the alternate history. But when you throw in the “sputtered” part, you aren’t actually doing economics. You’re trying to write historical fiction.
What I can do, though, is look at something like Turkish growth or Iranian growth or Thai growth and try to figure out what policies were different and why the growth rates were different with India. I can look at the different policies in Britain and the different policies in India and look at the different growth rates, and try to figure out whey they were different.
You are trying to do the same thing implicitly with geography and climate (comparing and contrasting between other climates and geographies), but with those, I don’t have to do the comparison, because India had the same geography and climate during all four periods. I’ve got my comparative model for geography and climate already just by looking at Indian history.
And I can make this exact argument for all the other factors you tried to posit. So, I’ve got multiple comparisons, between India and other countries during the colonial period, and between Indian and itself during multiple time periods. And the big change here is always government economic policy. It ain’t climate.
You do not, however, seem to grasp what “not equal” actually means and how it is relevant to the thread. It’s not just unequal government policies; it’s a whole range of different inequalities. Try to understand that point, please. If you cannot grasp why it is so fundamentally important to this topic, then I don’t think you can have a meaningful conversation about the topic. It’s that important.
Bullcarp. Nobody in this thread is making that claim. READ THE FREAKING THREAD, and maybe try to do so without your preconceived notions about what other people are going to say and what you want them to say. It’s not that government policy isn’t important, but at least some of the time the actions of any particular government are not the determining factor.
Had you read what I wrote with even the slightest care, you’d notice I was comparing the Indian geography/climate to those of Britain. Further, geography and climate both figure hugely into changing growth rates because of differences over time. To name just one factor, nineteenth-century industrialization was built on coal. Britain had a lot, India didn’t (at least in terms of resources readily exploited with 19th-century technology.) EVERY country that had rapid industrialization in the 19th century had ready access to vast quantities of coal, and the lack thereof by itself acted as a brake on Indian potential.
Today, India is one of the world’s leading coal producers, largely due to more modern mining technologies, but they still have to import huge quantities to feed their need for energy. They’re getting most of their imports from places such as Indonesia and Australia, which in the 19th century were not big suppliers. The geography of energy has changed enormously since 1818.
Since geography (of energy, of transport, of production, etc.) did in fact change, yes, it is part of your question to answer.
For example, a huge and increasing percentage of India’s GDP comes from the service sector; something on the order of 7-8% of GDP is derived solely from back office operations, call centers, and the like. The geography of how such processes work has changed just a tad since the days of quill pens and ledger books. 1991, e.g., is pretty much at the start of the Internet revolution, the point at which it starts becoming feasible to have your customer service reps on the other side of the globe.
It starts happening in the 1920s and 30s. You yourself admit “some reforms happened during the Raj”–you think those reforms didn’t have any effect? I noted that post-independence India accelerated these trends, but the trends didn’t start in 1947, and it is most assuredly not “racist nonsense” to point to acts such as the Communal Award of 1932.
I’m not claiming it is some great achievement for the Brits; I’m claiming that the breakdown of the caste system is one of the reasons why India started growing so rapidly. Do I need to remind you which side of the argument Gandhi was on, and why the Poona Pact is such a big deal?
That’s the heart of your argument, whether you wish to acknowledge it in so many words or not. The British cannot be held to have “messed up” the Indian economy unless you can point to some way in which Indian GDP failed to grow at the expected rate during the Raj. Whether you want to assert it should have grown at the rate of Britain, or a quarter the rate of Britain, or the post-1947 rate, or any other expected rate, you still need an expected rate to maintain your thesis, and you have presented no realistic scenario to establish that expected rate.
I am quoting and responding to your own words.
None of those are the argument I am making (and, frankly, I don’t see much evidence that anybody is making them here).
I read the freaking thread. Do you grasp how and why Nehru’s different path is significant to the argument within this thread? Do you understand why “Soviet-lite” happened, and why it could not have happened in 1858?
No, it’s not, because you haven’t considered whether the model that succeeded in Britain (Germany, France, the U.S., etc.) could in any way have succeeded in India even if the British had tried to do so, given the realities of 19th-century India. The commonalities among all of the nations that did industrialize on a large scale before the
Great War are well-studied; which of them apply to Indian society as it existed in 1818 or 1858?
Basic macroeconomics, however, doesn’t and can’t occur in a vacuum, which is what you are trying to do. Macroeconomic forces have different effects given different levels of human capital and natural resources, among other factors. How are you controlling for these?
I don’t see how I am misrepresenting your statements. I understand your thesis to be that “GDP figures prove the Brits messed up the economy.” Is that not your thesis? If not, can you express it in one or two sentences?
I grasp that you are trying to measure potential per-capita GDP in several different ways. All of those ways come back to comparing actual GDP changes in India during the Raj to actual GDP changes in some other place or some other time, in an effort to “prove” that the British messed up. I think your very approach is flawed because it assumes that GDP during the Raj should have risen, or could have been expected to rise, at some rate directly comparable to the rate in some other place or at some other time. Whether you recognize it or not, that assumption is built into ALL of your posited methods.
I understand perfectly well how GDP relates to measuring economic performance. However, “economic performance” is NOT what you need to be measuring here. To prove your thesis that the British messed up India’s economy, the relevant measures would be the extent to which actual GDP deviated from expected GDP for a country in India’s situation, which does require some alternate history and “what-ifs,” and for which simple GDP per-capita figures are wholly insufficient.
I don’t know how you could have missed filmstar-en’s posts in this thread, but his posts have done nothing but hand-wave away British colonial policy while attempting to claim that Indian economic performance after the Raj is terrible. So, I don’t know if the board still has that feature where you can skip posts or not, because I have no idea how you could miss his position. You are misrepresenting what has happened in this thread.
And you are also misrepresenting what I’ve posted. I’m not going to play along anymore. There are a few posters who raised some interesting questions in this thread, and I’m going to go back and answer them, but you and I are done. If you insist on misrepresenting what I’ve posted and putting words in my mouth, I see no point in continuing to engage with you. You make up crap, pretend I said it, and then pretend you have a point.
So, I want to go back to the original question–did the Brits drain India of wealth and then talk about WWII a bit here, because these tie together.
Under the Raj, the Raj government had to make certain payments to Britain (or to various British companies or individuals), usually through something called the “Home Office.” The payments were for things like railroad cars and weaponry and the like. On top of that, British government personnel were paid extremely high salaries (I’ve seen figures for 60 times the average Indian wage for starting train engineers and 3500 times the average Indian wage for the Viceroy, but don’t quote me on the exact figures). All of the salaries and equipment had to be paid in British currency, rather than Indian currency. And because the rate at which the currencies were fixed was usually detrimental to India, this meant that money was leaving India.
On top of that, we’ve discussed the lack of industrialization, which meant that there were no local sources for a lot of goods that the British personnel wanted to buy or that the emerging middle class wanted to buy, so that money flowed out of India.
Now, some of this is going to happen anyway in an independent country. But some of this is directly caused by the nature of the British Raj. I’ve seen figures that somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of Indian savings flowed out of India because of this setup attributable to the colonial nature of the Raj. That’s not small potatoes.
On top of that, the Indians who fought in the British colonial wars (that Dissonance mentioned) were paid from Indian tax money. So, the Indians paid to provide soldiers for Britain to expand its colonial empire. It’s a bit mixed on what currency the Indian soldiers were paid in at various times, but paying people to fight other people’s wars is something I’d put on the “wealth drain” ledger.
On top of that, there were some direct transfers at various points to the British government, just because. For, example, IIRC, India made a “voluntary” war gift of between $100 and $200M pounds to Britain after WWI (I’ll have to go look it up).
So, India was constantly in debt to Britain, and had to pay its debt on unfavorable terms (due to the exchange rate), although the debt burden did become better for India after 1913*.
During WWII, however, something interesting happens. This situation completely flips, and Britain ends up dumping a lot of money into India. At the end of WWII, Britain (could be said) to actually owe the British Raj money. Part of that is because, well, Britain had to send stuff and people to India for the war and spend money in India for the war and buy stuff from the British Raj for the war.**
So, by the end of WWII, Britain’s situation has completely flipped in a way. And it wasn’t really clear by that point whether the British could reverse the situation, even if they had wanted to stay. The Indians had disrupted a number of revenue streams for the British, so had Britain stayed in India, it would have just continued to be a financial drain on Britain.
*It gets better because they overvalued the Indian currency, which then promptly through India into 2 decades of deflation. The UK gives with one had and taketh with the other.
**Apparently, there was something in the Lend Lease Act which contributed to this, but I’ve never followed up on what it was.
Only thing I can think of Lend-Lease related in that regard was that the staging point for Lend-Lease to China was first Rangoon and then Calcutta, which poured a lot of money into the region.
I’m working on a theory. All this Lend-Lease money and British money flows into India, causing inflation. That means that the British have to buy stuff in India at prices inflated relative to any debt the British Raj has to Britain. We aren’t getting comparable inflation in Britain, and so India is basically paying the same amount to Britain, but Britain is now paying a lot more to India. And since we’ve got a fixed currency exchange rate at this point, the Indian currency can’t rise to counter this.
I’m going to have to go research this and see if this theory is correct.
This isn’t my favorite book, because I think some of the research is outdated. However, I can’t really hand-wave it away, either. But there’s plenty of good stuff in that chapter about how the British Raj economy was run, if you want to wade through it. It at least will give you an overview of the issues that get discussed when we’re discussing how the British impacted the Indian economy (even if I don’t agree with some of the analysis).
I want to talk about something else. Back in the old days, the view was that if you wanted to industrialize, you had to have tariffs to protect your growing industries. Everyone pretty much held this view. The British held it, the US held it, the Japanese held it.
And yet, the Indians were prevented by the UK from erecting tariffs to protect their industries. Even when the Raj actually took it upon itself to propose enacting a tariff, the British industrialists moved to shut that down. Why? Because according to their own economic philosophy, if India had enacted tariffs, India might have actually grown some industry.
So, we have a situation where the British get to enact tariffs against Indian goods, but the Indians can’t enact tariffs against anyone’s goods (and that includes the Japanese and the Chinese and various other countries that were trading with India).
So, what happens? Well, India becomes a good source for raw materials, but they don’t actually industrialize. The British manufacturers got what they wanted. And all of this was completely in line with industrialization and economics as it was understood at the time in Britain.
Of all the 19th-20th century imperial powers, the Japanese and Russians seemed to do the best at industrializing their colonial possessions. Ironically, given their reputation for brutality. (Some of Latin America has done a decent job developing, but they mostly won their independence before the industrial revolution so I wouldn’t count them).
Russia’s possessions in Central Asia of course weren’t precisely the same as colonies (they were the product of overland expansion, not maritime, and they were settled by large numbers of Russians), so take that for whatever it’s worth.
I read filmstar-en’s posts–I don’t think they say what you are reading them to say. He (she?) comes closest to a neocolonialist in this thread, but even he’s not making the exact arguments you are claiming for him. I think you are reading his posts (and mine!) through an ideological filter that is blinding you to salient points. You are inventing and attacking strawmen.
Furthermore, when I quote you directly, and you STILL claim that your own words are merely some crap I made up, you prove you are not paying attention even to yourself. What’s the point?
Nah, dude. When I point out that you are misrepresenting what I said, you ignore that and try to raise a new point. I’m not going to chase around your Gish Gallop.
Ok, let’s talk about climate, since it was raised in this thread.
There’s a theory that the reason the Southern US didn’t industrialize was because it was too hot. According to this theory, once AC became widespread and cheap, that made it possible for industries to move into the South. I’m only in partial agreement with this theory. There are certain types of manufacturing which you can’t run if it’s too hot, but the temperature requirements for manufacturing are different depending on the type of industry.
So, let’s look at India. Was it too hot to manufacture in India? Nah. India is a subcontinent with a wide variety of climates. There are places where the climate is temperate enough to support a wide range of manufacturing.
Take a look at this climate map:
You see that horizontal green band around the words “Madhya Pradesh?” The Indian government built a shit-load of factories in that band after independence. But, you might ask, isn’t that all inland? Yes, it is. But remember those vaunted railways that everyone keeps harping about? There was a way to transport goods from the inland all over India.
So, climate’s not a factor here. The Indians built a lot of factories with the exact same climate after independence that they had before independence.
Anecdotal evidence time: When I was young (in the 80s), we were visiting India. My uncle worked for the government, and my parents sent me to visit him in Bhilai (which is more or less in that green band). My uncle’s idea of fun was to tour factories. So, I toured a lot of factories in Madhya Pradesh. Very few of them had AC. Some of them had cooling systems (depending on the type of manufacture). But I sweated my ass off touring these factories.
Ok, fine. That’s an anecdote. But AC was still a luxury good in India during the 80s, and during the License Raj, there was plenty of manufacturing that was done without AC. And if it’s not AC (maybe you’re thinking monsoons or mosquitoes or something else), well then it’s up to you to produce evidence. Because there was plenty of manufacturing done in India after independence with the exact same climate.
Ok, let’s talk about coal. I don’t think coal is necessary for industrialization, but let’s assume that’s true for this post.
India was exporting coal by 1900. So, India has enough coal to send overseas, but they don’t have enough coal to industrialize? That seems pretty implausible.
And if you look at India’s coal production, it’s a pretty gradual increase until about 1980. I’m guessing that’s when new mining techniques started rolling in, but I really don’t know. Coal mining techniques aren’t an area which I’ve looked into deeply.
If you want to make the argument that coal was a limiting factor in industrialization, produce figures. Because, from where I’m sitting, India had a surplus of coal starting in 1900 and enhanced mining techniques don’t roll in until well after the License Raj is underway.
I am little puzzled by all this talk of neo-colonialism, which seems to be a particular fear of some of the contributors here. It sounds like a reds-under-the-beds thing? Is this some kind of Indian nationalist code word to close down discussion? Hey you disagree with me, you must be evil spirit from the past?
The British in India would have found it impossible to exercise any influence unless it was in the interests of political groups that already existed. It was a political balancing act. How else could a few tens of thousands of British control a territory of hundreds of millions? The intrigues of British involvement in India since the 17th century are an important part of understanding how India became consolidated and emerged into the nation state it is today.
But I guess that opinion is not shared by economics students with a nationalist bent who imagine that the story of India is to be found in tables of dubious statistics. Turning, what could have been a much more worthwhile discussion into a nit-picking slanging match about who-said-what is schoolboy stuff.
I think I shall retire to my hollowed out volcano, somewhere deep in China, and plot with my neo-colonialist chums how to undermine the noble efforts of heroic sub-continental yuppies in their quest for legitimacy and power over the wealth of the Indian subcontinent.
Are you asking about absolute human development (per capita income, education level, life expectancy, nutrition, industrial production etc.) or are you asking about rates of growth/improvement? I can answer either of those questions separately, but they are separate questions- Russia was more developed than India in 1917, so they were starting from a much higher place.
You keep saying you’re going to leave the thread, but you never actually do. And get off your high-horse. When you run around calling people “chippy nationalists,” you do exactly what you pretend to take so much umbrage about.
None of us can help it if you are bone-dead ignorant about the topic at hand. You seem to think that when you sling schoolboy insults, that constitutes an entire argument. It doesn’t.
Meh. So what? Neocolonialists deserve to be called out on their BS.
But, at least I’m not pretending that I’m above the fray, like filmstar-en is trying to do. He’s happy to sling insults, but then wants to run around pretending other people are the only ones doing it.
And, as you seem to acknowledge (I think), I’m actually making an argument in between condescending to the neocolonialists. filmstar-en isn’t.
